


everything feels too large (the steadings and the fields)

by harryhotspur



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Canon Queer Character of Color, Canon Queer Relationship, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dealing With Trauma, Dissociation, Emotional Healing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Support, Explicit Sexual Content, Explicit Talking About Feelings, Flashbacks, Healing from trauma, Hurt/Comfort, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Introspection, Laughter During Sex, Lots of comfort to go with the hurt, M/M, Medical Torture, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, Recovery, Returning to Malta (The Old Guard), Swimming, supporting each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 07:55:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29114883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harryhotspur/pseuds/harryhotspur
Summary: After London, Joe and Nicky go back to Malta. With Joe struggling to process everything, things are going to be difficult, and recovery is not a linear road. But they will get through it.Together.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 34
Kudos: 130
Collections: The Old Guard Big Bang





	everything feels too large (the steadings and the fields)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been a labour of love which I have been working on on and off since October - so pleased I can share it with you all now as part of the first Old Guard Big Bang. 
> 
> Thank you as always to my darling [Mags](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagpieMorality/pseuds/OldMagpie) for their always excellent and dedicated beta work and being my moon when I was lost in the darkness of html 
> 
> Massive love to [angels-and-aliens](https://angels-and-aliens.tumblr.com/) for pinch-hitting at short notice for this work and absolutely knocking it out of the park with the art. I am in awe of the art they have done for this story which is beyond my wildest dreams <3 please go and show them lots of love over on their tumblr. 
> 
> This fic deals with some pretty heavy themes so please let me know if anything needs additional tags and warnings. I hope you all enjoy reading, there is a lot of comfort to go along with the hurt <3

Joe set his sketchbook down on the metal table made hot by the midday sun. A few faint lines on the page were all he had managed to draw in the last half hour or so. They were meant to be the beginnings of the curve of Nicky’s nose, the jut of his jaw, framed against the Valletta harbour. Somehow, today, he couldn’t quite capture him in the way he wanted to. Joe was a quick sketcher; drawing usually came easily to him. He could do it anywhere, on a boat; on a plane; waiting for a mark to be lined up in Nicky’s rifle sight. On the opposite page, the only fruits of his earlier labour were a few sketchy imaginings of a water-taxi and some passers-by. Joe cast his eyes over the drawings, crumpled his brows and turned his sketchbook to the side. He prided himself on being able to capture movement. Today, his creations looked stiff and lifeless like mannequins placed in a half-empty department store window.

“I’m thinking about Booker,” Joe said, tentatively.

With their companionable silence now broken, Nicky looked up from the book he was reading and peered at Joe over the frame of his sunglasses. Malta did good things for him, allowing him to wear loose linen shirts, shorts and sandals. In their previous times in Malta, Nicky had relaxed and the thick cords of tension which held his body together softened in the heat and sunshine. This time, tight coils still enveloped him, drawing his shoulders into a tense line and setting his jaw like it was made of concrete.

“I thought we weren’t going to mention that name on this trip?” A muscle just below Nicky’s ear jumped.

Joe looked at him, eyes wide and open, head tilted in a way that said: _we need to talk about this_. Seeing his expression, Nicky exhaled and set his book down on the table. He took a sip of his cooling espresso in what Joe knew was an attempt to steel himself.

“I know, Nicolò...” Joe started. “I just - I need to talk about it all, okay? Since London, we haven’t talked about any of it that involves _him_.”

Nicky reached across the table and opened the pack of cigarettes which sat next to the silver holder of sugar packets and serviettes. He took one and placed it in his mouth, sucked in air and lit it. Wordlessly, he turned the packet around to offer one to Joe, but Joe shook his head.

“We have talked about it, Yusuf,” he mumbled around the cigarette between his lips. Nicky insisted he only smoked on holiday. But Joe knew it extended to when he was stressed, anxious, hungry, drunk, bored, or on a long stakeout mission. At least three of them applied to this situation. Joe looked at the still half-full packet and was surprised Nicky hadn’t got through them all yet. Nicky took another long drag on his cigarette and turned his head to blow the smoke away from the table towards the sea. The water sparkled behind him, light dancing on the surface as the water-taxis and ferries cut across it. Out in the distance, Joe could see the outline of Birgu, where they were staying in a little apartment. This morning, they had sat out on the balcony and had eaten their breakfast looking over onto Valletta from the other side of the bay. Joe loved Valletta. He loved sitting around the harbour. When they were here, it felt like a small piece of familiarity in a world which just kept changing. This cafe hadn’t been here the last time they had been in Malta but Joe liked it - it had a nice view.

“We haven’t _really talked_ about it though, have we?” Joe said slowly.

“I just don’t know what more there is to say,” Nicky said, taking another drag on his cigarette. “He made a choice to betray us - we are just torturing ourselves going over it again and again.” He picked up his cup and drained the last of the espresso.

Joe reached across the table and took Nicky’s hand. “ _I_ need to talk about it, Nicky. Besides, I’m worried about you. I’m worried you’re shutting down.” He looked into Nicky’s face, read his expression - saw his features tense and then soften again. “We need to discuss this. Or _I_ need to discuss it at least.”

Nicky squeezed Joe’s hand back, brushing his thumb over his knuckle tenderly.

“Okay,’ he said, sincerely. “We can talk about it.” He stood up and pushed the metal chair back, it scraped on the cobbles like the sound of a buzzsaw through bone. “I’ll go order us another drink. Do you want another Fanta?”

“Yeah, go on. The lemon one though, Nicky.”

Nicky took one last drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out in the sun-faded ashtray advertising some kind of beer. He reached into their wallet and flicked through a selection of debit cards until he found the euros tucked behind them. From across the table, Joe looked at the cards - the majority of them Sébastien had sorted for them. He’d organised the bank accounts; the identities; the papers. Sorting that was difficult in a world in which every payment could be traced back in some way. _Fuck. Booker wasn’t going to do that for them anymore. Copley would have to now, it seemed._ Nicky closed the small wallet, hiding the cards from view.

Melancholy building at the bottom of his chest, Joe watched Nicky walk into the small cafe. There was still a slight slump to his shoulders which hadn't been there before London. Nicky looked less exhausted than when they had arrived in Malta the previous night. A bath, twelve hours of sleep and a good breakfast had done at least something to revive them both. Even so, Joe could still see and feel the tension which emanated from him. Nicky thrived on routine and their usual ones had been smashed in front of their eyes in the last few weeks. They were trying in vain to recapture their usual Malta pattern but it seemed anything familiar was slipping through their fingers; dust on the road out of Jerusalem. Joe missed their farmhouse just outside of Mellieħa - the apricot and pomegranate trees outside their windows; their books on the shelves; the way the afternoon sunlight slatted in through the shutters; the feeling that they _truly_ belonged somewhere.

Nicky disappeared through the bead-curtained cafe door. He was struggling. Joe knew Nicky was aware of that - it was sometimes just difficult for him to say so.

The night after Booker’s betrayal they all crashed at one of their less permanent safehouses in Kent. They didn’t use it often and the block of flats it was in had been condemned a decade ago. They all walked wearily up the stairwell, careful to keep out of sight as metal doors clanged nearby and voices shouted from other floors. Most of the doors to the flats had been broken into and there were used needles, piss and broken bottles in the stairway. It was the perfect place for a group - covered in blood and with a duffle bag full of weapons - to go to lay low for a night.

By some miracle the flat they held the keys to was mostly undisturbed, albeit cold and damp. In the bedroom, the only place suitable for sleeping was a mattress which smelled strongly of mould. The clothes they grabbed from one of the bags stashed in the wardrobe also smelled. The jumper Joe pulled over his shoulders felt cold and scratchy against his skin. He watched Nicky from across the room like a hawk. His husband sat perched on the edge of the mattress, knees pulled up to his chest, shivering even though he was now wearing two jumpers and a parka with a broken zip. The blue glow of the camping lanterns made him look even more washed out than usual, and accentuated the dark smudges under his eyes.

Joe’s anger always burned like hot flashes of fire across his mind, but despite his own intensity of feeling, Nicky’s anger always worried Joe more. Nicky’s anger froze like ice, hardening into a slow-moving glacier which threatened to push rock, and earth, and life itself apart. Joe’s own anger burned out and died after its initial blaze; Nicky’s anger lingered until it started to eat away at him from the inside out.

Nicky’s anger hadn’t really had a chance to show yet, deadly focused as he still was on the task at hand; getting them to safety and making sure Andy was okay. Through the thin wall, in the next room, she lay on the sofa, trying to sleep off the pain of a gunshot wound with just over the counter co-codamol and ibuprofen. With how quickly their injuries usually healed, none of their safehouses held anything stronger. Nicky had changed Andy’s dressing and cleaned her wounds the best he could with what supplies they had managed to get from a pharmacy on the way. She had hissed as he wiped cotton wool dipped in saline across the gunshot wound. Joe had watched as Nicky placed the pink-stained swab into a plastic bag and smoothed a dressing over the wound. Now, he heard Andy stand with a groan and sit back down again, trying to get herself comfortable as her body adapted to her new condition.

Nile sat by the window in the bedroom with Nicky and Joe, turning her cross between her index finger and thumb. She watched Booker from the window. Joe moved to stand behind her, looking out over her shoulder. Outside, framed in the orange glow of a flickering street lamp, Booker sat on a low wall with a plastic bag next to him containing two bottles. One looked like a cheap bottle of some blended whiskey; the other a two litre plastic bottle of strong cider. Both were open and Booker took a deep chug from the plastic bottle, holding it in two hands. He set it down and lit a cigarette, the end flaring red as he inhaled. Joe watched as Booker looked down at his fist, turning it in the light, no longer bloodied and broken from where he had punched the coin operated gas and electric meter earlier.

“Is he okay?” Nile asked, as Booker drank from the whiskey bottle next. He tipped it back at a high angle and then wiped his mouth. “Maybe I should go down and see if he’s alright?”

“Let him do what he needs to do,” Joe said, turning away from the window. This close after his betrayal, Booker’s open expressions of self-hatred disgusted him. It felt deeply selfish- watching him try to trick his metabolism into allowing him to get drunk enough not to feel anything. Joe looked from Booker to Nicky, who lay curled in a fetal position on the mattress, facing away from him. He saw how Nile periodically checked her phone as if by habit, inhaled when she saw the photo on the lock screen, and then placed it face down next to her. He heard Andy stand up and change position again in the next room with a groan. Joe’s own fingernails were still ingrained with blood and dirt no matter how much he scrubbed them under cold water. Everytime he shut his eyes, Joe saw Nicky lying prone on the floor of the van; saw him strapped to the lab table; saw him with his brains blown out. Instantly, he was back there, healing lungs burning from gas, waiting for Nicky to take a breath again.

“Are you sure?” Nile asked again.

“Yeah - leave him. He’ll be alright - he needs to be alone I think.” Somewhere, deep down inside himself, Joe wasn’t sure if he was being too harsh. But ultimately he didn’t have the emotional energy to think about Booker right then. He didn’t have the emotional energy to think about anything really. In the last day everything had fallen apart. In the last day nearly all of Joe’s worst fears had come true. He just hadn’t expected Booker of all people to be the one pulling the trigger.

Nile exhaled and continued to look out of the window as she moved her gold cross up and down its chain. Joe knew she understood some of their pain. However, at the moment it felt like she couldn’t possibly comprehend the full depth of the betrayal they all felt. Over two hundred years, and they were all sold out for a chance to end it all. It was heartbreaking, no matter which angle you looked at it from.

“I’ll take the first watch,” Nile said. “You try to get some sleep, Joe.”

Joe nodded and went to lie next to Nicky. He wrapped his arms around him and whispered comforting words into the back of his neck. In his right hand, Nicky clasped a pistol, ready and prepared for an attack. He had stopped shivering a little bit, but his knuckles blanched white around the handle. Joe initially thought Nicky was asleep until he turned his head towards Joe. With soft words in Ligurian, he reassured Joe he was okay before turning back to place a soft kiss to his hand. Joe pulled a damp feeling blanket over them both and held Nicky tightly in his arms, almost afraid that if he let go Nicky would disappear from within his grasp.

Neither of them cried that night; they were too tired and too numb. Instead Joe just held Nicky close as he fell into a fitful and exhausted sleep. He must have dozed off at some point, but his sleep felt light and he awoke with a dry mouth and the beginnings of a headache.

The first few days were awful. Joe passed through them in a haze, anxiety pulling at the edges of his consciousness at all times - making him jump at shadows and Nicky’s touches. Nicky didn’t talk much and Joe didn’t either. The purple bags under Booker’s red eyes, his constant drinking and attempts at apologising turned Joe’s stomach. He wanted to grab Booker by the shoulders and scream: _you made this choice._

But at the same time, Joe loved him - _had_ loved him?

He missed him.

Then, in his mind’s eye, Joe saw Nicky strapped to the table; heard his attempts to muffle his screams echo in his head. Remembered his own pain, lesser, more dulled, as the so-called scientists cut into his flesh. Andy bleeding, bleeding, bleeding, the bloodstain on her shirt spreading and growing; an advancing enemy army drawing ever closer to victory. Nile; capable, wonderful but newly born into this strange world, as her group of guides fell apart around her.

Then, Joe felt bad for missing Booker.

The sound of Nicky coming back over to the table dragged him out of the memory. Two cans sat wedged under his arm and he balanced a fresh cup of espresso precariously as he weaved his way in between the tables.

“Quick service from my favourite waiter,” Joe laughed, as Nicky sat down again.

“Oh, you flatter me,” he quipped back. Then, with a wink, “I will be expecting a tip.”

Nicky placed the drinks down on the table, pushed the Fanta towards Joe and opened his own can of juice.

“When you said before you were worried about me shutting down,” Nicky said, his voice serious all of a sudden, as if he had been thinking the whole time he was away. “This is not going to be like after we lost Quynh, Yusuf. It has been four hundred years since then - you don’t have to worry.”

Joe remembered the silences which turned into arguments; the words both of them wished they hadn’t said and those they wished they had; sitting on a dock as rain lashed around him, throwing pebbles into the swelling sea and waiting and waiting. He had waited and hoped that Nicolò would come out of the tavern he had stormed out of earlier. Shivering in the early morning mist, Yusuf had prayed that the sea hadn’t taken his love as well.

Of course, Nicolò had come back and wrapped his cloak around them both. Apologies had been shared. They’d both kissed as if their lives depended on it. Nicolò had brushed the tears off Yusuf’s face and Yusuf had kissed along the wet tracks streaking Nicolò’s cheeks. He’d tasted salt and it was like the whole expansive ocean was contained inside Nicolò, all the pain, all the hurt, finally released. Then, as they had done for hundreds of years, they had both stared out, and faced the swirling greyness of the sea together.

Joe looked up at Nicky and saw faint echoes of that old Nicolò written across his features. The Maltese sun shone across his face and flushed his skin a light pink in contrast to the paper-pale it had been for the past few weeks.

“I know, Nicky, I know. I just worry,” Joe swallowed. “I was so frightened I was going to lose you in that lab. I’m - I’m just concerned about you, that’s all.”

“I know, but I’ll tell you if I am not alright, okay - we will get through this together,” Nicky said. He leaned over the table and pressed a kiss to Joe’s cheek. Joe knew Nicky was intimately aware of his anxieties regarding a possible separation in life or death. Joe knew Nicky saw how his gaze was filled with panic everytime he revived. He saw how Joe reached out instinctively to touch him; to ground himself; to reassure himself it was real - he was real. That they were alive and together again. That it was going to be okay.

Joe knew Nicky was aware how much this whole ordeal had affected him and vice versa.

“You promise?” Joe said, a bit taken aback at how unsure his voice sounded.

“I promise,” Nicky nodded. He took a sip of his coffee and placed the cup down again. “Okay, do you want to start then. Tell me how you are feeling. Better to talk about _him_ in the hot sun and open air with a fresh cup of coffee.”

Nicky hadn’t said Booker’s name since they had left him on the banks of the Thames. In the days leading up, he hadn’t looked at him - hadn’t acknowledged him or his presence. Whenever Joe looked at Nicky while Booker was in Nicky’s line of vision, he’d see those pale eyes narrow as if he was lining up a target in his rifle sight. It wasn’t that Nicky didn’t care; he did. He cared a lot. Joe knew that Nicky had been working his feelings out internally, weighing up the options, making up his mind.

Joe took a deep breath.

“I’ve been thinking about what Sébastien said in the lab, about how we always had each other but he just had his grief,” he started. Nicky exhaled and rolled his eyes. “Don’t roll your eyes, Nicky, it’s important we talk about this.”

“Okay, Yusuf, sorry - go on...”

Joe took a sip of his Fanta, his mouth dry all of a sudden.

“I’m worried we were selfish. Did we miss something? Could we have helped him? He was hurting and did we _not notice it_? Did we _cause_ this somehow?! Could we have stopped this?!” Joe knew the questions were spurting out of him like arterial blood from a wound. Once he started he couldn’t stop the excessive verbal bleeding. Nicky placed a hand on his from across the table; applied welcome pressure and grounded him again.

“We didn’t do anything wrong, Joe,” Nicky said. His eyes were focused, but behind the hardness of their gaze dwelled a barely contained pool of pain and loss. “He could have told us how he was feeling. _My_ love -” Nicky’s voice cracked and he placed his other hand over his heart “ _\- our_ love is something we should never be ashamed of - we left behind that feeling long ago, I can’t -” Joe squeezed Nicky’s hand back. “I refuse to _ever_ feel ashamed for loving you.”

Joe suddenly felt cold in the warmth of the Maltese spring. He lifted Nicky’s hand up and pressed a kiss to the knuckle, trying to transfer nearly a thousand years of love in one touch of skin to skin.

“I know, Nicky. Me too. You are -” As he sometimes did when talking about their love for each other, Joe found the words felt inadequate. “You are all and more to me.” He inhaled, psyching himself up for the next part. “Even so, Nicky, you of all people know how hard it can be to talk about these things sometimes.”

Nicky nodded. He flicked the ring pull of his can of juice over and over, creating a soft twanging noise, rhythmic like a heartbeat.

“I do,” he said. “But it doesn’t change what he did. He went behind our backs - he sold us out. He shot Andy.”

Joe knew that, he knew all of that. He knew that Nicky, with his view of the world, found Booker’s actions repulsive. There was kindness and compassion to Nicky which still made Joe’s heart ache after all these years. With Nicky’s boundless empathy, on first appearances, people thought forgiveness would come easy to him. However, Nicky could understand a person’s actions and their reasons deeply but it didn’t mean he had to agree with it. It didn’t mean that everybody deserved his kindness. If anything, it made it harder for Nicky. He could understand Booker’s pain; he could understand Booker’s reasoning; but he couldn’t rationalise or understand the jump from that to his actions and the consequences they held.

“Booker is hurting, Nicky. He’s hurting now in a way I don’t think I can imagine.”

In that phrase, _he wants to die_ went unspoken.

Throughout Joe’s long immortality, one of his biggest fears had been death. He had died hundreds if not thousands of times and even now the thought of dying permanently made his breath catch in his throat. It wasn’t so much his own death which disturbed him, but Nicolò dying without him. Or him dying without Nicolò. The thought of leaving him behind made his palms start to sweat. He knew there was a grain of selfishness to it; with Nicky by his side, Joe was an expert at living. Dealing with the impact of Nicolò’s death was an undiscovered country Joe didn’t want to explore; a border he didn’t want to traverse; a sea he didn’t want to cross. Seeing both his closest friends fall apart after a bereavement had instilled him with a deep primal fear, not of death _per se_ but of _living without Nicolò_.

He looked up to see Nicky watching with an almost painful tenderness in his eyes.

“You’re hurting as well, Joe. Andy’s hurting. Nile’s hurting. I’m hurting,” Nicky said eventually. He stopped twanging the ring pull and took another sip from his espresso. Slowly, he turned his head and looked out over the harbour. “Being in pain doesn’t excuse creating more pain.”

“I know,” Joe said, sadly. _How did Nicky always say things in the most profound but simple way?_ “I just worry about him, we don’t know where he is. We don’t know what he’s doing.”

“Yusuf...” Nicky started.

“You remember when we first met him?” Joe added.

“In the dreams?” Nicky’s hand reflexively moved up to his neck and rubbed against the patchy stubble growing under his chin.

“No when we _met_ him,” Joe said. Nicky raised an eyebrow, puzzled. “The second time - not the first.”

A silence fell between them. Joe looked at Nicky and by the look in his eyes, he knew exactly what he was referring to. Ever on the same wavelength, they both looked out over the water. A ferry horn sounded and they both watched, eyes distant, as it pulled away further up the harbour.

  
  


The dreams were brutal. All three of them awoke choking as a man died on the end of a crudely made noose, strung up on a tree in the snow. A jeering crowd taunted him. The man was emaciated with dirty blonde hair and a scruffy beard. He wore only a loose white undershirt and breeches, both thin and bloodstained from the beating he had received before they strung him up. Warm clothes were a luxury not to be wasted on a soon to be dead deserter. Joe immediately grabbed his sketchbook and started to sketch the man. Nicky coughed a wad of phlegm up into his handkerchief. Through the darkness, Andy peered across from the other bed.

“Another one,” Andy said, her eyes wide, irises catching the moonlight.

Bitter cold chilled Joe to the bone for days afterwards; no matter how much he tried he couldn’t get himself warm. They slept fitfully for nearly a week as the man died over and over again. They felt his fear; his panic; his eventual resignation. They all felt what it was like to awake from death to immediate pain and breathlessness, only to die again and again. Andy stopped sleeping entirely and Joe could tell she was sinking back into the ocean which held Quynh. It hadn’t been long in the grand scheme of things since Andy had called off the search. Joe knew how much it hurt. Now there was a new immortal, dying and reviving over and over again. The parallels were deeply and bitterly ironic.

In Joe’s dreams, the man they would come to know as Sébastien hung there - dying, freezing, dying, starving, dying, alone, dying - until the weight of the snow combined with his bodyweight on the tree branch caused it to sag and splinter. Eventually after a lot of struggle from Sébastien, the branch broke. He fell to the floor and lay prone in the snow. The cold took him after that, again and again. For nights on end Joe awoke shivering as Sébastien continued his litany of slow and painful deaths and resurrections.

They set to the task of finding him at once. All three of them needed a stop to the nightmare that was Sébastien le Livre’s life.

By the uniforms of the soldiers in their dreams, they deduced he had been in Russia and part of Napoleon's _Grande Armée_. From the pained prayers and broken curses he’d uttered in the few moments before the rope squeezed the life out of him again, Joe figured out he spoke Occitan. So he spent the weeks, the months, the year, before they found him learning as much of the language as he could, while Nicky and Andy had tried to track his movements through their dreams.

They managed to find Sébastien close to a year later, relatively soon for a new immortal. In the confusion of the defeat, he’d managed to start stumbling his way back to France. When they finally met him in person, he was half-feral with long matted hair and a beard encrusted with ice. In his hand he held a pitchfork he had ‘liberated’ from a local peasant family. He brandished it towards them with deep burning rage in his eyes.

In the shell of a burnt-out farmhouse, Joe held his arms out in a gesture of peace and explained in hesitant Occitan who they were and who Sébastien now was.

“Fuck off,” Sébastien hissed, pacing back and forwards, stalking around like a caged animal. “Fuck off, I don’t want any part of your little creepy cult.”

“You really should come with us.” Andy said, her voice calm but firm - in the way it always was. “You can’t go back to your family, you need to stay with us now. We can keep you safe.” She reached to place a hand on his shoulder.

The man swung the pitchfork towards her with a deep guttural growl. Nicolò’s hand tightened around the pistol at his belt and the sword next to it but Andy sidestepped deftly out of the way.

“I already have a family,” Sébastien growled. “I don’t need you - fuck off and leave me _alone_.”

“At least let us come with you,” Nicolò said, with a softness in his voice almost as if he was coaxing a spooked horse back to shelter. Joe had seen him do that many times, whispering to the animals in calming tones which made their ears prick up and their breathing slow. “For a little way.”

Sébastien’s expression hardened and he tightened his grip around the pitchfork. He looked off into the distance, as if he wasn’t fully seeing the scene before him.

“Maybe I am just living to get back to my wife and children and when I get home - things will be normal again.” Sébastien’s voice had a unhinged quality to it, as if he was trying to reassure himself. He licked his dry and cracked lips,bared his yellowed teeth and broke into a soft, bitter, laugh. “Perhaps I will get home and die on the threshold.” Nicky took a step towards him and held out his hand. Sébastien stepped back on his left foot, narrowing his eyes as he brandished the pitchfork again. “Leave me to my purgatory,” he hissed.

Without another word, he limped out of the farmhouse door, still gripping the pitchfork and using it as a makeshift crutch.

“We should go after him,” Joe said.

“We should,” Andy added in affirmation. But Nicky placed a hand on Joe’s arm, holding him back.

“Let him go,” he said, in that tone which made everybody listen. “He is allowed to make his own choices.”

So they let him walk out and gave him the dignity of that choice.

They all kept tabs on Sébastien afterwards, staying around Marseille and keeping watch on the little family who lived in a small house on the outskirts of town. After a few years however they retreated, taking care of their own business but still checking in subtly from time to time.

They only saw him again a decade later. There had been whispers of a man in the months prior whose son had drowned in the sea while fishing in a freak storm. His father had supposedly jumped in to rescue him. Both were thought lost to the sea until the father was washed up on shore five days later, coughing out seawater, alive and seemingly unharmed.

_A miracle,_ some of those whispers said.

_He faked it,_ others said. _He’s a forger - a criminal._

_There is something more going on here,_ was the consensus.

When they got wind of the rumour, Andy insisted they all return to Marseille. On their way back from the market one day, Joe and Nicky saw another funeral. They stood at the edge of the churchyard and watched the small casket being carried out of the church to be interred in a small grave by a weather-beaten wooden cross. Three graves now lay under its shadow, side by side.

Two men were arguing inside the churchyard. Joe and Nicky retreated to a small outcropping overlooking the churchyard and watched as one walked away, shaking his head. The other stood with his head bowed, fists clenched, a bottle in his hands, unmoving. The man dropped to his knees in front of the group of graves, swigging from a bottle until the night grew dark. The cold stone chilled the bottom of Joe’s legs, contrasting the warmth which came from Nicky’s thigh pressed against his own. Then, the man - whose name they now knew was Sébastien - stood up, shakily on his feet, the bottle empty, and left the churchyard.

Later that night, the three of them went to the house on the outskirts. Andy tried the door and it swung open - unlocked. The entranceway leading into the living quarters beyond was quiet, domestic almost, with different sized pairs of boots by the door. A woman’s coat, slightly dusty, hung on a hook on one of the walls. As they entered into the main living area, Nicky bumped into something and cursed under his breath. Joe cast their small lantern over it and the flickering light illuminated a wooden carved horse, big enough for a small child to sit on, that rocked back and forwards with a scraping sound. Nicky gently rested a hand on it, stopping the rocking. The air smelled metallic and stale, a mixture of old blood and liquor. Joe inhaled through his nose, trying to keep his breathing measured and calm, unsure what awaited them.

Andy walked ahead of them, her own lantern casting orange light in front of her. As she moved forwards the dining table slowly loomed out of the darkness. A figure sat on a bench behind it, obscured by the shadows. Joe covered his mouth and nose as the smell of blood grew stronger.

“Sébastien?” Andy said, her voice sounding too loud in the quiet space.

She moved the lantern and the flickering shadows lit up Sébastien’s face. In a shaking hand, he held a pistol, the barrel in his mouth, finger hovering over the trigger.

“Sébastien - ” Andy dropped the lantern down on the table. The flame swung from side to side, sending long shadows dancing up the walls. Nicky placed a hand on Joe’s shoulder, stopping him from rushing forward.

“Wait, Yusuf,” he said softly. “Let her.”

Now illuminated by the lantern light, Joe saw blood and viscera dripping down the back of Sébastien’s neck. The wall behind him was covered in it and it dripped from the back of his chair with a sickening _blip, blip._ Broken bottles and cups were spread out on the table, and half of it was also flecked with blood. Andy took Sébastien’s hand in her own and slowly eased the gun out of his mouth. He let her, as if all the strength had left his body. Andy leaned over the table, took his cheeks in her hands, and brought his face close to hers.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, even though Joe could tell by her tone of voice that it wasn’t. “It’s okay.” With her words, Sébastien’s passive and glazed expression crumbled. His eyes focused again; his shoulders began to shake; his bottom lip quivered and he finally began to cry almost silent, gasping sobs. With her thumbs, Andy softly brushed away the tears running down his face and whispered soothing words to him. She moved her hands down so they were bracketing Sébastien’s shoulders, holding him upright as he cried more openly now, loud and keening like a wounded animal. Joe slowly walked forward and Nicky followed, his hand now resting on the small of his back. They each placed one of their hands on Andy and - as they always did - helped to hold each other upright.

Eventually, Sébastien stopped crying and just lay there with his head against Andy shoulder, his blotchy face turned to one side, staring blankly at the wall.

“We will take him back to the lodgings,” Nicky said. Joe startled and turned towards him, the sound of his voice ringing loudly in Joe’s ears in the heavy silence which followed the sobbing. Andy shifted and Sébastien slumped forward, pitching dangerously in the chair, unable to hold himself up until Nicky took over. He kneeled down and wrapped his arms around Sébastien’s waist. Joe took off his coat and helped Sébastien into it, and placed his hat on Sébastien’s head, pulling it down at the back to try and hide the majority of the blood on his head and neck.

They took him, pliant and exhausted, back to the tavern they were staying at. Nicky apologised profusely to the landlady and asked for a bowl of hot water. Once they were up in the room, Joe eased a shaking Sébastien into a chair and helped him strip off his blood and vomit stained shirt. Speaking softly in Ligurian, Nicky set the bowl of water down next to them on the table, pulled up a chair behind Sébastien and began to wash off the blood encrusted onto his hair and neck. In front of them, Andy took a cloth and washed his chest, then helped him out of his filth stained trousers. Joe handed her a spare pair of his trousers and one of Nicky’s undershirts and stepped back. He looked on as, with care, Andy passed the clean trousers over Sébastien’s legs and coaxed him to stand up as she pulled them up to his waist. Using careful and slow movements, Nicky dried Sébastien’s hair and helped him into the shirt. The broken man was almost asleep when they finished so Joe took over and steered him to the small cot Andy had called hers. Soon, he was fast asleep - utterly exhausted.

In the middle of the night, a strangled cry and then the sound of wet coughing and retching awoke them all. Joe found himself pulled roughly out of a deep sleep by Nicky tensing, pushing himself out of his embrace and into a sitting position. As he blinked awake, he saw Andy was no longer curled next to them, but now sat on the edge of the bed. The moonlight illuminated everything in a pale blue glow. It cast dark shadows across Sébastien’s face. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked down to check it, as if he expected to see something other than stringy drool there.

“It’s these dreams,” Sébastien said with resignation in his still rough voice. “I get them... ”

Andy leaned forwards on the bed, her gaze as icy blue as the moonlight.

“What do you dream of?” she asked, the tone of her voice indicating to Joe that she already knew.

Sébastien looked down at his hands and gripped his left in the right in an attempt to calm the tremors which ran through them.

“A woman in the water,” he said, staring straight ahead, through them all and into what should have been an unimaginable reality. “She dies - again and again.” Andy let out a pained cry, halfway between a yelp and a hiccup. She stood up, crossed the short distance between the two beds and dropped hard onto her knees on the floor next to him.

“Please, Sébastien,” she said, her voice fragile, on the edge of breaking, a tone which Joe had hoped to never hear from Andy again. “Please tell me everything.”

So he did.

“I just keep seeing him in that house,” Joe said, trying to push back the memory; the smell of blood and liquor oppressive like a freezing fog. “I’m concerned it’s going to happen again.”

“It’s possible. I’m worried as well,” Nicky said, looking down at the table. He lit yet another cigarette and inhaled deeply. “I just - _we_ just need to deal with what we went through. We need time to heal from this, Joe.”

“I miss him,” Joe said simply, even though his feelings surrounding it weren’t simple at all.

“I miss him too,” Nicky agreed, the first time Joe had heard him say those words. He took another forlorn drag on the cigarette and sighed. Joe wondered if Nicky was going to say something else but he remained in silence.

“I miss him but I just don’t think I’m ready to forgive just yet,” Joe said instead, and scrubbed his hand across his face, running his fingers across his beard. “Even though I feel I should be.”

Nicky turned his head slightly and looked out over the harbour again, his gaze far away - the way he looked when he was living more in the past than the present. “Forgiveness is hard,” he said after a while. “It shouldn’t be given to a person if it is not truthful. It needs to be earned.”

“I forgave you,” Joe said. Nicky made a small sound from the back of his throat and turned back towards Joe, looking him dead in the eyes. Then the intensity in the green-blue of his irises softened and a shadow of a smile passed across his face.

“That is because you are you, Yusuf.” Nicky shrugged his shoulders. “You probably forgave me too early - but I will be forever grateful that you did, my love.” There was a heartbreaking tenderness in Nicky’s voice. Joe had been a different person back then. He hadn’t seen the world from the zoomed out perspective which immortality had given him. Back then, with Nicolò, he hadn’t seen people and humanity in general make the same mistakes over and over again. A deadly dance of hatred and bad choices quickstepping across countries, between peoples, leaving death and pain in its rhythmic wake. Even with all that, deep down Joe still believed in forgiveness - still believed in the worth of it. He knew Nicky did as well. A silence fell between them until Nicky said, solemnly: “ _Pater, dimitte illis: non enim sciunt quid faciunt._ ”

“From the Vulgate?” Joe replied, recognising the words and scrambling for the translation. “Ah, ‘Forgive them, Father, for’ - ” He stumbled on the rest of the line, voice fading out.

“- ‘They know not what they do’,” Nicky filled in. His eyes darkened. “He knew, Joe,” he said, with a seriousness in his voice. “I hate so much that he knew what he was doing.”

“I do too,” said Joe, a little numb, voice barely above a whisper.

“We need time.”

Joe nodded. For Sébastien, forgiveness would come - just not yet. For now they all needed to heal. Nicky took his hand across the table and proceeded to say exactly what Joe needed to hear:

“Shall we go for a walk?”

The tension broke. Joe nodded - a walk seemed good.

Nicky took Joe’s hand as they walked through the streets of Valletta. The city itself was calming. It had just the right amount of hustle and bustle, but quiet streets they could retreat into if the crowds got too much. They stopped outside a small bookstore and Nicky flicked through some of the second-hand titles on the trestle table outside. He turned what looked like a romance paperback over in his hands, read the blurb and then placed it back on the stand, adjusting the pile of books so that they were straight. It was as if it was the one thing he could make right - a small way he could seize back control.

“I was thinking I would -” Nicky said and then stopped, the implication clear in his words. Joe knew what Nicky was thinking about. Buying books for Booker when they were apart in downtime had been one of their little traditions for the past century.

The last time they were here, at the end of the last century, Nicky had bought a copy of Seamus Heaney’s new translation of _Beowulf_ from the English Language section at the back of the store. Joe remembered sneaking a quick read while sitting under the apricot tree in their garden and being struck by the poetry. As he had sat bundled up in his jacket against the winter chill, a particular passage near the end of the poem had stood out to him. Hrethel’s loss of his sons in a blood-feud was illustrated by the image of a father lamenting. The lines ‘the wisdom of age is worthless to him / morning after morning / he wakes to remember that his child is gone’ had instantly reminded Joe of Booker - quiet and mournful, drinking to remember, or drinking to forget. Joe couldn’t unsee the deep well of loss and pain which lived behind his eyes. It was a grief which Joe felt he would never really understand.

When they’d returned back to the Charlie safehouse in early 2000, Nicky had given the book to Booker wrapped in newspaper. He had smiled as he unwrapped it carefully.

“It’s like you know I like stories about tragic heroes,” Booker had said, flicking through the pages. “Not sure what that says about how you view me.”

“I thought you might like something other than _Don Quixote_.”

“Hmm,” Booker replied. “You can’t argue that it isn’t a masterpiece though.”

That evening, when Nicky and Joe had emerged from the bedroom, they had found Booker curled up on one of the chairs in front of the TV, fast asleep, the book dangling from his hands. Andy had sat in one of the other chairs, curled on her side, also asleep and snoring gently. Joe remembered being overwhelmed by a feeling of deep fondness so strong it compelled him to wrap his arms around Nicky’s waist and nuzzle his head into his shoulder.

“Was the last hour I spent eating you out not enough, my love,” Nicky had said, with a chuckle in his voice. He was still more open in his speech than usual - a unique feature of his post-coital high.

“No - no, I mean _yes_ ,” Joe had replied. He’d looked out over the scene: the used cups on the table; the half-finished bottle of wine; and the plates stacked next to the sink. “I just feel happy.”

Nicky had hummed against him.

“Me too, my love.”

Together, they had cleared up the plates and brought them over to the sink. Nicky had washed and Joe dried them, putting them away in the cupboards as they listened to the sounds of Andy and Booker snoring. It had been a new year, a new decade, a new century, a new millennium - and Joe, back then, felt safe and hopeful.

Now - twenty years later and feeling like the whole world had tilted on its axis - another line from _Beowulf_ returned to Joe’s thoughts. Heaney had described the father’s grief by stating: ‘everything seems too large / the steadings and the fields’. Those words were a very apt description of how Joe felt. Looking out over the Valletta street, at Nicky in front of him and the bookshop they had visited countless times before, Joe couldn’t shift the deep-rooted feeling that something was just _wrong_. Everything felt off, as if he was experiencing the world in slow motion - staticky like an old videotape, or like sound crackling in through a badly tuned radio.

Seized by a deep melancholy, Joe watched as Nicky went back to the book table and flicked through another of the piles. He held up a book with an English title in his hand. The cover was mostly white with the Thames cutting across it in red.

“ _Rivers of London_ ,” Nicky mouthed. “Do you think Nile would like this?” That was Nicky - always looking at practical solutions; always looking for a way to make somebody else smile. “I remember her mentioning she liked fantasy.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, recalling a conversation about Lord of the Rings he’d had with Nile. “You’re going to get her a book?”

“It feels weird not to buy somebody one,” Nicky replied. He held the book out in his hand, surveying the cover again. “I’ll go and get it. Are you going to wait outside, love?”

“No,” Joe replied. “I’ll come in with you.”

Since Merrick’s, Joe had been seized with anxiety whenever he was separated from Nicky. He wasn’t usually like this. He always _worried_ \- but not to this extent. Now, when Nicky went out of his sight, Joe found himself panicking as though he would somehow just disappear. So Joe followed Nicky into the shop. It smelled warm inside, mixed with the dusty and musty smell of old books. Nicky went to the counter and talked to the man behind it in fluent Maltese. Joe stood behind him as the man put the book into a paper bag and Nicky slid it into their satchel.

“Are you alright?’ Nicky asked after they left.

“Yeah, of course,” Joe replied, a little too quickly.

“Hmm.” From Nicky’s tone, Joe could tell he wasn’t convinced. “I was thinking of maybe going for a swim,” Nicky continued. “We brought the swimming stuff. I’ve been wanting to go into the water since we were in... ” His voice trailed off, as if he didn’t want to mention the lab; the pain they had gone through; the suffering.

“You’re going to swim in the harbour?” Joe asked, a little perplexed.

“Yeah,” Nicky replied. “There is that quiet pier. You remember the one we swam off in the sixties?”

“Will it still be quiet?”

“It looked like it at the end of the century when we were last here.”

Joe looked down at his feet and hoped that this small thing would still be the same.

Nicky touched Joe’s hand softly. “We’ll check.”

They walked through the streets to the pier Nicky remembered. The water looked clear, blue and shining in the sunlight. The only people nearby were a few locals also going for a swim, two people fishing and one man unloading a boat on another pier further up. Once they put their bags down, Joe held a towel up in front of Nicky while he undressed - easing his shorts and underwear off and pulling his swimming trunks on.

“Will you be careful?” Joe asked, worry clouding his mind. Nicky raised an eyebrow in the way he always did when he was confused.

“Joe,” he began. “Nothing is going to happen to me. I’ve been swimming for a long time. It’s just in the harbour - there is barely a current.”

“I know, I know,” Joe said, and took a deep breath, trying to reassure himself.

“You worry,” Nicky said, saying exactly what Joe was feeling. “I’ll be okay, Yusuf.” He stepped out from behind the towel, lean and lithe, broad shoulders and muscular thighs - a swimmer’s body. “Would you rather I didn’t go in?”

“No, no, Nicky - it’s okay,” Joe said, as he pulled a stray thread off Nicky’s trunks. “Just don’t go too far okay?” Nicky’s expression softened and Joe knew how much Nicky knew he was hurting; how much Nicky was hurting himself. Gently, Nicky leaned in and pressed a kiss to Joe’s lips.

“I never will,” he promised, and then motioned to a small raised part of the pier and laid the towel over it. “You want to sit here?”

Joe nodded and sat down on the towel. Nicky kissed him again and walked along to the end of the pier and slipped into the water, graceful like a seal. Joe watched him, a bit afraid that if he took his eyes off him Nicky would disappear into the blue-green water, never to return.

Nicky kicked his legs, dived and surfaced again. Hair now soaking, he waved to Joe from the water and Joe waved back.

“It’s nice and warm,” Nicky called, swimming up to the side of the pier and resting his elbows on it.

“Enjoy,” Joe said back, wishing he sounded more enthusiastic. Nicky smiled, pushed off from the pier and began to swim slowly away. Still watching him out of the corner of his eye, Joe unlocked his phone. It was new but still contained the welcome encrypted chat app which they all used to keep in contact. Andy had been skeptical and only agreed to it when Booker explained the encryption to her. The security, he had said, was better than that used by the FBI. Andy had said she was sure the FBI had been hacked and Booker had just shook his head, sighed, and brought his hand to his face.

A deep ache started in Joe’s chest again, the ever present realisation that things were not going to be the same. He stretched his legs out and read through the messages, noticing there were new ones from Andy.

12:55  
_How’s things in Malta?_  
_Hope you two are behaving yourselves..._  
14:20  
_Looks like you are busy :P_  
_Anyway, turns out hangovers when you are not immortal fucking suck. Somebody should put that in the handbook. Maybe I should write it..._  
_Me + Nile drank a bottle of wine and watched The Jane Austen Book Club_  
_That’s ‘girl time’ apparently._

He smiled at the screen. He knew Andy wasn’t okay even though she would make out that she was. Out of the three of them, her and Booker were the closest as a unit. They travelled together a lot more often, drank together, died together, killed together, comforted each other together. Joe was pleased Andy had Nile with her now.

He typed back:

14:50  
_Malta is good._  
_You know we always behave ourselves._  
_It is odd staying in Birgu but the weather is nice._  
_How’s Nile?_

Three dots appeared on the screen as Andy typed - connection between her and him.

While he waited, Joe flicked through to the other message threads. The one under Andy’s read ‘Booker’. They had texted a lot in the year they had been apart from each other. Joe scrolled back through some of the messages and saw chats about football, the weather - messages which ended with: ‘miss you, brother.’ Joe inhaled and felt a lump rise to his throat. He missed Booker, he missed talking to him, missed his presence beside them all. Since he had left for exile, Joe found himself turning around to talk to him and then stopping himself when he realised Booker was no longer there. He opened up one of the menus and hovered his finger over ‘Delete Conversation’. Joe considered what to do, and then clicked out of the menu, leaving the chat still on his phone.

Andy was still typing so Joe looked up and towards the sea. Nicky lay on his back in the blue-green water, floating idly. He looked at peace, lazily moving his arms through the water and letting the salt keep him buoyant. Joe watched as he turned onto his front in the water and swam out in a poised breaststroke, dipping his head in and out. When he emerged, water ran down his face and his hair clung in wet strands to his scalp. Nicky always looked at home in the water, much more than Joe ever felt that he did.

Since they had lost Quynh, Joe had been reluctant to swim in the sea, feeling claustrophobic whenever he was in there - as if he was sharing a space with their lost sister, but was unable to find where she was. He felt eyes on his back all the time. He loved rivers and lakes but sometimes the sea was just too much. Nicky on the other hand, was always in the camp that if something scared you, you should face it head-on and try to understand it. Nicky was always wanting to understand. He had been the first one of them to swim in the sea again after Quynh. Nicky had dived into the crisp blue Mediterranean and emerged again, skin glistening with water droplets. Afterwards, he had lain down on a rocky outcrop to dry in the sun.

“It’s nice to know the sea can still be pleasant,” he had said as Joe trailed his fingers through the dried salt tracks across his chest. “You should come in next time, Yusuf.” Joe had brushed Nicky’s long wet hair out of his face and leaned in to kiss him.

“Maybe,” Joe had said. “Maybe soon.”

Joe looked back from his memory to present day Nicky swimming. The past and present versions, Nicky and Nicolò, seemed to overlap like stacked microfiches. He looked so similar but so different to all those years ago. His profile was the same, only his eyes were softer now and he smiled more. Out of the corner of his eye, Joe saw Nicky treading water, splashing the saltwater over his hair and neck like he was washing something horrific away. Joe thought back to Merrick’s; to Nicky lying on the floor, blood surrounding his head like a halo, Joe’s own blood hammering in his ears until Nicky, finally, finally gasped a breath again. Those few moments had felt like an eternity.

His phone buzzed again and he almost dropped it. Jolted from his thoughts, he looked down to see the message from Andy.

15:05  
_She’s okay - we are on this island, way north. The tide comes in and cuts the causeway off twice a day. I hate it_  
_Nile is spending a lot of time walking_  
_We can talk to each other. That is good_

15:17  
_Good. Pleased Nile is doing okay._  
_How are you?_

A pause. Then Andy started typing again.

15:19  
_Surviving._

Joe laughed at that. It was _very_ Andy. She struggled to talk about how she was feeling sometimes. Both her and Booker were similar that way. His phone buzzed with another message:

15:20  
_I miss him._

15:20  
_I miss him too._

15:20  
_Then I feel bad for missing him._  
_I hate what he did to us._  
_It just hurts...._

Joe looked down at his phone. He could feel Andy’s pain through the messages and a lump rose to his throat.

15:21  
_I’m sorry, Andy._  
_I feel the same._

Joe heard a splash as Nicky surfaced from the water next to him. He rested his elbows on the side of the pier and looked up at Joe.

“You look pensive?” he said. “You alright?”

“Oh yeah, fine,” Joe lied. “I was just texting Andy.”

Nicky kicked his feet out behind him, still resting on the pier.

“Is she okay? How’s Nile?”

“They’re alright,” Joe said, knowing none of them were _really_ alright. “Copley’s got them on a island somewhere, near Scotland. Andy is... being _Andy_. She said Nile is okay, she’s just walking a lot apparently.”

“We should call them later this evening,” Nicky said and shook his hair like a dog drying off. “Check in. See how they are both doing.”

“We should, yeah.”

Deep down, Joe knew Nicky felt a little guilty for coming to Malta. He did as well. It was almost as if they were abandoning Andy and Nile - the two of them needed to deal with this though, _together,_ in the place where they always came back to in search of safety and familiarity. They had both been through a lot - both of their worst fears had nearly been realised. Joe knew Andy was okay with them taking some time for themselves, but even so, he couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty about it.

Nicky pushed himself up onto the pier with a groan. Water streamed off him and he wrung out his loose trunks and brushed droplets off his arms. Joe reached for the towel underneath him and held it out, helping Nicky to dry himself.

“You didn’t want to go in?” Nicky asked while Joe held the towel out around him. He stripped off his wet trunks and wrung them out. Joe caught just the slightest glimpse of the top of his thighs, the curve of his hips, the dark hair leading down from his navel to the pink flush of his cock. He passed Nicky’s underwear and shorts back across to him and watched as he dressed himself.

“No, no,” Joe replied as he folded up their towel into their bag. “I didn't fancy it.”

Nicky walked up to him and took his hand. “Shall we go back to the apartment?”

“Yeah, think I’m ready to go,” Joe said.

They walked back through the afternoon streets of Valletta in companionable silence. Every so often, Nicky pointed something out to Joe - a cosy corner, an interesting shop front, something which had changed. Joe smiled and nodded along, but felt - as he had done since the lab - that he wasn’t _really_ in the conversation. That he wasn’t really in his own _skin_ , but somewhere in between - residing in the interstitial fluid between his body and consciousness. They took the ferry back to Birgu and Joe watched as the outline of Valletta got smaller and smaller, receding into the distance like a childhood memory.

When they arrived back at the apartment, all Joe could do was pace anxiously around the room. The atmosphere felt weird, as if something was off. The air felt heavy - suffocating almost - filled with ozone. He could tell that Nicky knew he was on edge; he sat on the small armchair across the room, looking at the book he had bought for Nile, trying to look relaxed although tension exuded from every pore.

“Joe,” he said after a while. “I know how you are feeling.”

Joe felt the immediate urge to snap back: _no you really don’t,_ but he bit his tongue. Nicky _did_ know, he just had a very different way of showing it when he was hurting. In this stage, they often grated against each other. But they always understood, always sat physically and metaphorically with the other and tried to feel their pain.

“I just feel... wrong,” Joe said, disrupting his pacing and sitting down hard on the edge of the bed. After going through something traumatic, through intense pain, it took a while for Joe’s body to feel like his own again.

Nicky furrowed his brows. “You’re feeling detached?” he asked.

“A bit,” Joe understated.

“Showering helped after Mexico City.” Nicky’s eyes unfocused and he stared off into the middle distance. Joe shuddered at the memory: the sound of gunfire; Nicky pressing his hands to a red and oozing gash across their friend Pablo’s neck; Joe telling him it was going to be okay as his eyes glazed over; sheltering in the hospital afterwards; gunfire again. So much death. So much horror. It would have been incomprehensible if they hadn’t lived the lives they had lived.

“I didn’t feel as bad then,” Joe felt almost guilty for saying it, as if the pain of hundreds had made him feel less than the pain of just him and Nicky, tortured for only a few days. “It only lasted a little while.”

“Maybe try the shower?” Nicky said. “It might help?” That was Nicky, always trying to look for practical solutions to their problems. Always trying to make it better for Joe. Always trying to take some of the pain out of the world, even if he ran his hands through broken glass to do it.

“Okay,” Joe agreed reluctantly. “I will.”

“Shall I make you a drink for after?” Nicky asked. “A coffee?”

“A tea, maybe,” Joe said. He felt a bit too jittery for coffee.

“Okay,” Nicky said with a smile. “Call me if you need anything, right?”

Joe went through to the bathroom and, eyes half closed, undressed without looking at his body. Shivering a little, Joe stepped over the side of the bath, turned the shower on and stepped in. The pressure was low, but the water was hot. He took a washcloth and started to wash himself - lathered it up and wiped it under his arms and across his chest. The smell of the shower gel and the warmth of the water soothed him a little. Joe allowed himself to relax for a few seconds, focusing on the feelings of the cloth against his skin; the water cascading over his shoulders; the hum of the extractor fan.

Then - sharp and sudden like the onset of an acute pain - he remembered Booker was gone again, remembered everything that had happened. Suddenly his thoughts, his feelings, the physical sensations on his skin, were too much and not enough simultaneously. One thought had the power to send him back to those early hazy days just after Merrick Labs when nothing at all had felt real.

In that mirage-like time, him and Booker had gone to a chip shop together to get food for the group before they moved to the next location. Booker had insisted that he would go alone, but Joe had insisted on going with him. Together they stood in the shabby shop, white tiles on the floor, the smell of grease in the air, an old-fashioned looking illuminated sign displaying the menu above the counter.

“Arsenal,” Booker had said, pointing to the TV screen on the wall in the corner, an old model - chunky and fixed with a bracket.

“They aren’t playing well,” Joe had said and then shut up.

Both of them had stood awkwardly in the back of the queue in the shop, standing a bit too far apart from each other. A silence had spread out between them which had never existed before. Joe had always found it easy to talk to Booker - but now, now it felt impossible. He had still smelled strongly of alcohol; his eyes were red and puffy; and he stood with his hands jammed in his pockets.

“They don’t have gravy down here,” Booker had said, squinting at the menu, his hands still firmly pressed in his jacket pockets. “I’m going to get curry sauce.”

“Get what you want,” Joe had replied and looked down at the post-it note with Andy and Nile’s orders written down. He already knew Nicky’s. They had placed their order and waited for everything to be ready. The humid silence between them had hung in the air, thick and suffocating.

“Joe, I’m sorry,” Booker had said after a while. “You know that right?”

“I do,” Joe had replied. He’d shuffled his feet on the linoleum floor. The smell of grease in the air had been stifling, making it thick and heavy. Joe had looked Booker deep in the eyes, trying to figure out the man he had known and trusted with his life for two centuries. He’d found no answer in his expression even though he desperately wanted to. “Why Sébastien?” Joe had questioned. “Why?”

Booker’s face had fallen and he looked down at the floor. The oil in the fryers hissed as another basket was dunked into it.

“Joe -” he had begun. “I thought - I meant to -” He’d shaken his head, unable to find the words.

Joe had also shaken his head, held his hand up and went back to looking at the game on the TV. At this point, in this early stage, Booker’s words hadn’t done anything other than make Joe angry and upset. Joe had wished more than anything that he had just _talked_ to them. He could have just _told_ them how he was feeling. He hadn’t had to sell them all out to the highest bidder in order to get what he’d thought he wanted.

Once the cashier had placed the white paper wrapped bags on the table, Booker reached into his back pocket and brought out his wallet. Joe had brought out his and placed his card in the PIN machine before Booker could.

“I’ll get it,” Joe had said, his tone a bit more snappy than he wanted it to be.

“Oh,” Booker had replied, “I thought I would...” He’d trailed off and let Joe pay. Joe had grabbed the carrier bag off the counter, smiled and thanked the cashier, and promptly left the shop. Booker had trailed behind him. _It would take a lot more than buying some chips for Booker to make this up to them_ , Joe had thought. In the car, they’d all eaten in silence, only punctuated by the sound of the rain hammering on the metal roof. All the while, the heavy smell of grease had hung in the air as thick as the tension.

Back in the shower in Birgu, Joe sighed and brushed water out of his eyes. He had been crying without realising it, salt mixing with the freshwater of the shower. His eyes were swollen and stung a little. Joe still felt stuck in the past, trying to understand _why_ Booker had done what he did. Why had he made that choice? Why had he chosen to do what he did? They had all sat and talked and laughed like everything was normal when he _knew_ what was going to happen. It hurt. It _really_ hurt. That was the only way to express it.

The water ran cold. Joe stepped out of the shower and placed his feet on the mat. Out of the water, he looked down at his wet body, at his thighs, his cock, knees, ankles and feet below. They still looked slightly alien - as if they didn’t belong to him. This feeling of being outside of himself was familiar to Joe, but he still hated it.

In the mid 2000s, Joe had become very interested in psychology and spent many a long night sitting cross-legged next to Nicky, the big textbook he had bought spread out on his knees. The book had said that dissociation was a survival mechanism; a way for the mind and body to be able to cope in a traumatic situation when all agency was taken away.

Joe wiggled his toes against the tiled floor and almost expected their reaction to be delayed. Instead, they moved up and down as soon as his mind willed them to. He sighed and wrapped the towel around his waist. Recovering from these things took time. He knew that. Even so, the feeling in the aftermath stage was odd. Their bodies showed no sign of injury but deep down they still felt the phantom mental pain of what had been done to them. Their healing, in a way, made it worse - there was nothing to show for it, no time to recover physically or mentally. The brain was tricked into feeling that, really, nothing should be erroneous at all. However, every time, it felt deeply, deeply, soul changingly wrong.

Joe walked over and looked in the mirror above the sink. The bright light above flickered. A crack ran down one corner of the mirror, breaking his image up slightly. Joe’s reflection stared back at him, his curls wet and heavy; dark puffy bags under his eyes; mouth a tight line. Curiously, he pressed the pad of his thumb under his eye and gently pulled the bottom lid down, revealing the red. He blinked and watched the tears coat the outside of his eye. At some point, during the experiments, the scientists had jabbed a biopsy needle right into the pupil and withdrawn fluid. He had heard Nicky shouting and then whispering soothing words next to him as his vision faded back in. Joe removed his thumb from under his eye and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to shut down the memory. He closed his eyes and immediately saw Nicky on the table instead. His wonderful, beautiful, beloved Nicky reduced to a piece of meat. When he wasn’t out of it, he’d heard his love screaming; heard his blood fall to the floor in pitter patters like afternoon rain; heard the teeth splintering whine of a saw as they cut through his bones. Now, his own physical pain was a distant memory, a dull ache, but he still felt every minute of Nicky’s as if he was covered in open, weeping wounds. The scientists had been brutal but methodical, with a calculating coldness created by their pursuit of knowledge. The way they’d talked about him and Nicky like they were nothing - not even human - had turned Joe’s stomach.

He gasped as the image of Nicky’s chest splayed open flashed behind his eyes. All Joe could see was the glistening blood and viscera contrasting with the white of ribs, an operating light pulled down over him as the scientists all talked in hushed voices. Feeling suddenly horribly nauseous, Joe leaned forward over the sink, worried for a second that he would start retching. He breathed deeply; counted to ten; tried to imagine him and Nicky on a warm beach; and waited for the feeling to pass.

It wasn’t like they hadn’t been through things like that before.

The last time both him and Nicky had been tortured together was in the south of Italy during the Second World War. Joe had watched as a grinning soldier pulled Nicky’s head back by his hair. Another had reached into his mouth with a pair of rusty pliers, clamped them around his right incisor and yanked downwards. As Nicky screamed, physically Joe had thrashed against the bonds tying him to a chair, but mentally felt as if he was somewhere up in the rafters of the drafty outhouse, looking down on the scene - utterly helpless. He’d wished he could swoop down - an avenging angel - and rip their captors apart limb by limb. Joe’s mind had stayed up there, roosting like a bird in the rafters, when they turned their attention to him. Morbidly fascinated, he’d watched as they crushed each of his fingers in turn. Nicky had screamed louder and Joe had realised belatedly that he was screaming as well. Rough shouts and sobs forced their way out of his throat and burned like acid - or maybe it was actually bile rising up his gullet - Joe hadn’t been sure. They must have only been there for a day or so but time had taken on a horrible hazy quality where every blow, every burn, every cut, felt like it was stretching off into eternity.

Eventually the soldiers had realised they were healing and had gone off into a corner to discuss. Joe had heard mentions of Berlin and felt panic rise like a cloud of mustard gas in his chest. Nicky had looked at him, narrow-eyed and serious from across the room. Dried blood had covered his mouth; it ran down his chin and neck in lumpy rivulets and soaked into the front of his white undershirt. _We’ll be fine,_ he had mouthed. As he spoke, through the encrusted blood, Joe had seen a faint flash of white as his teeth pushed back through his gums. They had used the pliers again, more out of morbid curiosity than to extract information.

Silently and expertly - with the freedom of the soldiers being away - Nicky had broken his own wrist and slipped out of the shoddily tied rope. Joe had already been starting to do the same thing. In flash, Nicky had spun the chair around and grabbed a discarded knife off the bloodstained table. He’d signalled to Joe and then they were on the soldiers in seconds - apex predators on the hunt. Frantic and erratic gunfire had cracked through the air, followed by gurgles and screams. Then, eerie silence.

Joe’s eyes had met Nicky’s. They’d both stood panting, knives in hand as the smell of fresh blood mixed with the already foul and stale stench of the barn. Joe had watched himself as Nicky stepped forward, took his hand and pressed a kiss to the inside of Joe’s healing wrist; the only part of his body somehow not covered in blood. The sound of their own rapid breathing had been undercut by the faint sound of birdsong, seemingly coming from far, far away.

It had taken Joe two weeks to feel that he fully inhabited his body again.

It’s been three weeks since Merrick Labs.

Joe slowly got dressed, pulling a clean set of cargo trousers over his legs and a light shirt over his body. He tugged the bathroom light off; plunged the small room into darkness and left his reflection in the mirror.

He entered back into the main room, now turned a hazy orange with the afternoon sun. Joe looked across to the bed, to the kitchenette, to the small chair in the corner. It only took his brain a millisecond to recognise that there was something missing. Nicky. His heart hammed in his chest and he immediately felt his palms grow sweaty. He scanned the room again, his breathing quickening, and the fog of panic descended upon him. Joe rushed to the balcony door and poked his head out of the curtain. He looked out onto it - saw the chair, heard the street below. _No Nicky_.

He rushed across the room again and opened the front door of the apartment, looking out into the foyer. Joe scanned up and down the corridor. “Nicky?” he called. No response. He shut the door and went back into the room.

Immediately, thoughts of catastrophe span through his mind. He was back on the floor in the lab again only this time Nicky didn’t gasp and open his eyes. Nicky had been kidnapped. Nicky had left him. Nicky was one hundred percent dead in a ditch somewhere. The room started to spin and Joe’s heart felt like it would hammer out of his chest. _Should he go out onto the balcony again?_ Some rational part of his brain thought he might be able to see Nicky down in the street below. He might have just popped out. That was rational, right? But where would he have even gone to?

Joe pushed the balcony door open as wide as it would go. It hit against the wall with a thudding sound. He needed some air. On the balcony Joe blinked in the sunlight, still breathing hard, heart pounding, eyes rapidly looking from side to side. Then he turned around fully.

His eyes couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing.

_Nicky_.

Joe blinked again. It was Nicky.

He was standing off to the side of the balcony, hidden from view a little, smoking another cigarette and looking out over the city. Joe immediately felt a rush of relief - he was here; he was alright. He was fine.

“Nicky,” he gasped. His voice came out rough and strangled, barely managing to escape past the mixture of declining panic and rising relief in his chest. “God, I thought something had happened. I couldn’t -” Joe ran out of air and breathed in again, raggedly and noisily. “I couldn’t _find you._ ”

Nicky turned, and the small smile which crept across his face whenever Joe was in proximity turned into something more confused.

“I was just out here, Joe,” he said. His eyes scanned Joe up and down, recognising what was going on.

“I thought you’d gone.” Joe found himself swaying and leaned back against the wall of the balcony, trying to force himself to stay upright. It sounded silly now, but before it had all felt so real. The emotions warring within him left him feeling unbalanced and shaky. The fear hadn’t fully subsided even with Nicky standing in front of him, alive and real; whole and tangible. He stood in the shadows and the ash from the untapped cigarette in his hand crumbled to the floor in a trickle of orange and grey.

“Joe -” Nicky said and stepped slightly forward towards him. Joe continued to gulp in oxygen, trying to force himself to breathe normally but failing miserably. Concern flashed across Nicky’s face. “Talk to me. Talk to me, please.” Joe didn’t know what to say, there was so much unsaid, so many worries in his mind. He didn’t really know where to start.

“I -” Joe started, and then tried to say what he hadn’t said since the lab. “I saw - in the lab -” Joe’s words failed him and instead he drew a line down his chest from the hollow in the middle of his clavicle to his diaphragm. He opened his hands outwards like butterfly wings; the movement mimicked a flayed open chest. “I couldn’t _do_ anything - I was sedated. I couldn’t - ”

The colour drained out of Nicky’s face. He closed the gap between them to place a hand on Joe’s trembling shoulder.

“Oh, Yusuf,” Nicky said. “I’m sorry”

Joe only managed to choke out: “Nicolò -”

“What do you need?” Nicky said and reached up to kiss him, softly and tender. “What can we do to make it better.” Joe just looked at him, at his blue-green eyes which held more empathy than he ever thought possible; at the curve of his jaw which still astounded him; the pale pink of his lips; the jut of his nose - everything which made him Nicolò. Joe didn’t know what would make it better. _Just let me crawl inside your chest. Just let me live there and escape all of this and just be surrounded and overwhelmed by you - a whole world made up of just Nico, Nicolò, Nicky._ He wanted Nicky to hold onto him and to never let go. He wanted the reassurance that Nicky wasn’t going anywhere, he wasn’t going to die, he wasn’t going to leave him alone. But deep down, Joe knew that that was something neither of them could ever truly promise to each other. So, instead, he said:

“I just need to feel you, I just need you close.”

Before he had even finished speaking Nicky wrapped his arms around him and drew Joe into a tight hug, enveloping him in warmth and safety.

“Shhh,” he soothed, his voice taking on the tone which always, no matter how bad things got, recentred Joe again. “I’m here, Yusuf. I’m here. I’ll always be here.” Joe’s mind screamed at him: _how do you know that?_ Nicky rubbed his back in slow circles and let Joe lean his weight against him, holding him upright. “Come here,” Nicky whispered and eased them both into one of the patio chairs so that Joe was sitting across his lap as he held him. From the taste of salt in his mouth, Joe knew Nicky was crying. He reached down and kissed Nicky, sloppily and furiously and without dignity. Nicky kissed him back, leaning up into it and rocking him back and forth on his lap. Joe allowed the feel of Nicky’s lips against his to soothe him, sobbing and kissing him at the same time.

“I’m just scared,” Joe hiccuped as they pulled away. “With what has happened with Andy, with Booker, I am so scared of losing you.”

“I know,” Nicky said. “I know, but I’m here.” He reached up and dabbed at Joe’s tears with his shirt sleeve, wiping under his eyes and across his cheeks. “Better?” he asked.

“A bit,” Joe replied.

“You’re shaking.” Nicky took one of Joe’s hands in his own and pressed a slow line of kisses to each knuckle, worshipping each one.

“I feel stupid.” Nicky looked up at Joe again; he still held Joe’s hand and his mouth grazed over it, readying for another kiss.

“Don’t, Yusuf, it’s okay.” He kissed his hand again, lips lingering.

Joe watched, entranced. Nicky did have very beautiful lips _._ Suddenly seized by a very different urge - a sudden primal need for closeness and connection - Joe spun around on Nicky’s lap so that he was straddling him. The patio chair squeaked in protest at the movement. He traced a hand across the front of Nicky’s shirt, playing with the buttons and feeling his ribs - now intact and whole - underneath the fabric. Almost amazed by this, Joe leaned down and kissed Nicky again, more needy this time, starting with mouths closed and then drifting open. Nicky paused for a second and pulled away slightly. “You sure?” he whispered. “Are you alright?” Joe hummed in affirmation, slipped a hand under the fabric of Nicky’s shirt and splayed it across his stomach. Assured that Joe was okay, Nicky moaned softly into Joe’s mouth as he let his hands wander further downwards to toy with the waistband of his jeans.

“Wanna touch you,” Joe mumbled against Nicky’s chin as they broke apart from the kiss. “I want to feel you close to me.” Other than a quick hand-job before they had left for Malta, they hadn’t had sex since Morocco. Dry spells were not unusual for them, especially on missions, but after everything they had been through, Joe wanted to see Nicky’s face contorted in pleasure rather than pain. He wanted to feel again that their bodies were more than vectors for violence and hurt,capable of much greater things. Cheeks flushed now, Nicky leaned forward and they kissed again. He ran his hands up Joe’s back under his shirt, rubbing his thumbs over the nubs of Joe’s spine.

“What are you in the mood for?” Nicky asked, eyes heavy-lidded, searching Joe’s face for what he needed in that moment. “Do you want me to take control?” Joe needed that sometimes - for Nicky to tie him up, to make the choices; allow him to disappear and begin to float in a new world built solely upon sensation. He trusted Nicky implicitly, but after Merrick Labs Joe didn’t feel he could give up that control just yet. Thoughts of letting go, of being restrained - which usually turned him on even just thinking about it - made him feel like he was going to tip back over into panic again.

“No - no. Not today.” Joe smiled into another kiss, and ground his hips down, cheeks flushing as Nicky let out a small whimper. “I want to take care of you.” He kissed a line along Nicky’s jawbone, flicked his tongue against his earlobe and sucked ever so gently. Joe knew what he needed. He had to somehow make himself believe that Nicky wasn’t just going to disappear into thin air; or be randomly kidnapped off the street; that they were safe now. Safe to love and touch and disappear into the pleasure they knew each other’s bodies could bring.

“Hm,” Nicky said, his voice thick in that unique way it became when he was aroused. He bucked his hips up against Joe, searching for friction. “Tell me what you want to do to me.”

“You like that, don’t you,” Joe whispered into Nicky’s ear. Nicky laughed softly and the vibrations travelled through Joe’s chest.

“I like it when you use your words, you make everything sound beautiful.”

“I mean - I was planning on just being filthy.” Realising they were blocked from view by the low wall of the balcony and Joe’s body, he allowed himself to slip a hand inside Nicky’s jeans, touching him gently over his underwear. Nicky inhaled sharply and ground his hips into Joe’s touch.

“Somehow, you even make the filthiest things sound like poetry.” Nicky gasped again as Joe moved backward as much as the jeans would allow and cupped his balls, massaging slowly in the way he knew Nicky liked when they were just getting started.

“Okay, I think I want to spread you out on that nice hotel bed -”

“Mmm, it wasn’t too nice on my back last night -”

Joe lightly bit Nicky’s earlobe in chastisement. “Babe - honestly. Do you want to hear or not?”

Nicky laughed again and Joe was seized with a feeling of deep love building at the bottom of his chest. “Sorry, go on.”

“As I was _saying_ , I want to spread you out on the _adequate_ hotel bed -” He tracked his other hand up the inside of Nicky’s thigh. “ - Just want to kiss you all over, slowly, to show how much I love each part of you, until you are wriggling underneath me, almost begging to be touched.” Nicky whined softly and Joe moved his hand forwards again, toying with the fly of Nicky’s briefs. Joe felt him harden more at the mixture of his words and touches. _Fuck why was Nicky so hot._ Even after nearly nine hundred years, Joe would never get sick of this - every time it felt magical.

“And then what will you do?” Nicky spoke in a low register, breathy and needy.

“I won’t make you plead,” Joe said, still whispering in Nicky’s ear. “I’ll just know exactly when to flip you over and start to go down on you - slowly at first, just the way you like it - then begin to push my tongue inside.” Nicky’s cock twitched against Joe’s hand. He looked down to see a small damp patch beginning to form on the front of Nicky’s grey underwear. Joe shifted, feeling himself harden in his trousers at the sight. “I know how you can nearly come from that alone - I’ll get you right to that point and then slip my fingers inside.” Joe traced his tongue around the shell of Nicky’s ear and marveled at how he shivered underneath him. “Get you nice and ready for my cock and fuck you slowly and see how many delicious noises I can wring out of you. See how far we can go until you can’t bear it any longer and then I’ll wrap my hand around you...” Nicky bucked up harder at that and the plastic chair protested again and swayed dangerously.

“Shit, Joe,” Nicky hissed, clinging onto his hips as the chair righted itself again with a creak.

“Is that what you want?” Joe asked, ignoring the furniture malfunction and moving his kisses down to Nicky’s jawbone again. He splayed a hand across Nicky’s chest as he continued to palm his cock.

“I want to get off this balcony and this chair,” Nicky laughed, and then whimpered as Joe squeezed him slightly. “But yes.” He raised an eyebrow, narrowed his eyes, and placed his hand over Joe’s inside his jeans. He pressed down, grinding Joe’s hand harder against his erection. “Can you not feel what you do to me?”

“Yeah,” Joe whispered and made a move to get off Nicky’s lap. He took Nicky’s hand and pulled him up gently from the chair. Nicky fumbled with the fly of his jeans, shrugging them up over his hips again from where they had ridden down.

“Let me clean up first,” he said, pulling the door open into the room. “I’ll just shower quickly.”

“Yeah, of course,” Joe said as Nicky led him to the bed to sit down. But when Nicky pulled away, Joe held onto his hand tightly.

“Joe -” Nicky started, flexing his hand in Joe’s grip. “You’ll have to let me go, my love.”

Reluctantly, Joe did. Nicky went through into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. Joe heard the sound of the shower running and the floorboards creaking as Nicky got himself in the shower. The thought of having Nicky so close so soon was intoxicating, however, Joe couldn’t help but feel a bit of nervousness.

It usually didn’t take long for Nicky to clean up. The more functional parts of their bodies had ceased to disturb or embarass them many, many years ago. They’d had sex without access to bathing supplies or running water. They’d fucked in deserts, at the back of army camps, on trains, in caravans, everywhere and anywhere. Many times both of them hadn’t showered for weeks but just needed to feel that closeness and release. Even so, when it was available, they both liked to make themselves clean and ready for the other. It just wasn’t something they were prone to spending unnecessary time on.

The mattress creaked as Joe shifted back on the bed and began to slowly unzip his cargo trousers. He pulled them down completely and removed his socks. After that, he unbuttoned his shirt a little way, just revealing the top of his chest. He didn’t remove it completely; Nicky liked to do that part.

Joe imagined Nicky in the shower - the showerhead in his hand, getting himself ready for him - and reached his hand inside his boxers to give his cock a few cursory strokes. He whimpered slightly and bit at his bottom lip as slow waves of pleasure followed his touches, almost surprised he could still _feel good_ , that his body could feel like _his._ Even a small reprieve from the detached feeling which had plagued him after Merrick Labs was worth it.

He had spent the last three weeks going through the motions as they all tried to navigate the new world they now walked in. At first, there were the practical things to sort: Andy’s injury; getting to a safe house; Nile; and the question of what to do with Booker. Everything had been too much. The usual solace and connection Joe found in being close to Nicky didn’t make him return to himself in the way it usually did.

Once they had left Booker on the banks of the Thames, they had both laid together on a Travelodge bed somewhere off the M25. It had been the first time they had had some privacy and the space to think. Nicky lay on the bed half clothed, lit by one of the opposable lights fixed to the headboard. Joe had reached out and touched his face, traced a curve from cheek to jawbone and inhaled the faint scent of shampoo from Nicky’s wet hair. He had leaned in and pressed a kiss to Nicky’s lips that started chaste, then intensified and deepened in the way that both of them knew meant it was leading somewhere else. They’d both taken each other in their hands. Nicky had melted into each of Joe’s touches, whimpering softly under his breath as they both stroked each other to the same rhythm. He had come first. His release came quickly and almost silently as he’d spilled onto Joe’s stomach and his own thighs. Still panting hard, Nicky had taken Joe’s cock into his hand again. Joe had watched, his mind elsewhere - detached - as Nicky’s hand moved up and down around him. Physical pleasure had built low in his stomach at each touch, but hadn’t reached his mind.

“Do you want me to stop?” Nicky had whispered against his neck, after what felt like a while. He’d touched Joe gently on the side of his face with his other hand, bringing him partially back into himself. “Joe?”

He had shaken his head and said: “No, No - keep going.” He’d wanted to feel like he belonged in his own body again; to prove to himself that he could feel something good instead of the phantom sense memories of pain and torture which still flashed across his mind. Nicky had started to move his hand again, falling into the rhythm he knew Joe liked, working slowly around his head and then moving down. The pleasure had built and then dulled again. Joe had looked down at his cock in Nicky’s hand and growled in frustration. Nicky had shushed him gently and began to move faster. The warm pleasurable sensation of his hand had turned prickly as Joe tipped suddenly over the precipice into overstimulation - only without his usual release first. He’d hissed and winced. Looking heartbreakingly concerned, Nicky had stopped immediately and pulled his hand away.

“Slower?” he had asked.

Joe had shaken his head, rolled over onto his back and flopped against the pillows.

“Maybe just stop,” he had said, placing his hand on top of Nicky’s. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to come.”

“You can finish yourself, you know,” Nicky’s warm breath had ghosted over Joe’s lips. “I don’t mind - if that’s easier.” Nicky had pressed a kiss to Joe’s nose and pulled him in close to him.

“I don’t know, Nicky,” Joe had replied and buried his head into his shoulder. “I’m not feeling it for some reason.” At one point, many years ago, he would have felt embarrassed or worried that Nicky might feel like he couldn’t satisfy him. By now, they’d been together long enough by that those thoughts had long since passed.

“That’s okay,” Nicky had whispered. “We’ll get some sleep.”

After cleaning himself up, Nicky had reached over and turned off the light, leaving them both lying curled up against each other in the darkness. After a little while Nicky had fallen into a fitful sleep. Ever so often, Nicky had tensed, flexed his fingers and ground his teeth in that horrible squeak-scratchy way he was prone to when stressed. Joe had lain awake in the darkness all night, feeling like he was out of himself - still in the lab; still leaving Booker on that beach; still locking eyes with Andy and feeling the sickening sense of dread set in. The darkness had grown heavy, until it was almost suffocating.

In contrast, now, light spilled out into the room still lit by afternoon sunlight as Nicky opened the bathroom door, dragging Joe out of his thoughts and back into his body. Back to Birgu. Back to the present. Nicky stood blinking in the frame; a light blue towel wrapped across his waist, drying his wet hair with another. Joe met Nicky’s gaze and drew his hand out of his boxers.

“Hey,” Nicky said, slightly bashful. A smile crept across his face. In his hand, he held their small leather washbag which Joe knew contained their supplies.

“Come here,” Joe said, crooking a finger towards himself. Nicky crossed the room and let the towel drop just before he reached Joe, sitting on the edge of the bed. He laughed as Joe’s gaze went directly to his now soft cock hanging, pink and beautiful, between his legs. Joe found himself thinking _fuck, he’s gorgeous._ Even with all the pain they had been through together - Joe was thankful he always had this to come home to.

“You look like you haven’t seen it before,” Nicky said, placing the washbag down next to Joe on the bed. Joe didn’t take his eyes away and a soft pink blush crept across Nicky’s cheeks. “It’s endearing.” He stepped forwards so one of his thighs was inbetween Joe’s legs and played with the front of Joe’s shirt. “You left it on,” he said.

“I know you like to take it off.” From where he sat at the edge of the bed, Joe’s eyes were directly in line with Nicky’s chest. Starting from behind his knee, Joe traced a hand up Nicky’s thigh, brushing his fingers through the tangle of dark hair there. Nicky shivered gorgeously against his touch and began to undo the buttons on Joe’s shirt. This close Joe could smell the nice shower gel they had brought with them. Leaning in closer to Nicky, he inhaled the vetiver and pepper smell on his skin. Nicky shuffled in closer, allowing Joe to explore further up his thigh, and leaned in to ease the shirt off Joe’s shoulders. His leg brushed ever so slightly against the front of Joe’s boxers and sent a slow rolling wave of pleasure from Joe’s groin to his stomach.

“You are so beautiful,” Nicky said and pushed Joe’s shirt open. As he lowered himself to his knees, Joe’s hand slipped out from between his thighs. In a dancing motion, Nicky traced his fingers up Joe’s stomach and across his ribcage. He pressed a kiss to Joe’s nipple, sucked gently and traced his hands down to the waistband of his boxers. “Do you want me to get you started?” Nicky asked, looking up with wide eyes, already a little wild. He pulled the waistband forwards; peeked inside and smiled at the sneak preview. The sight of Nicky kneeling in front of him and looking at his cock with such reverence made Joe harden in his boxers. From Nicky’s satisfied hum, he knew Nicky had witnessed the effect on him. “My mouth?” Nicky asked. He signalled for Joe to lift his hips and slowly pulled his boxers down.

“Yeah, Nicky, please. Don’t take me all the way though, I want to - I want to make sure I can -” Nicky pressed a slow line of kisses up his thigh which sent goosebumps scattering across his flesh. Nearly at the top, he lightly sunk his teeth in and sucked. Joe inhaled deeply and fisted his hands in the sheets.

“Beautiful,” Nicky whispered as he drew his mouth away. His breath tickled in the crease where Joe’s hip met his pelvis and Joe reflexively bucked forward. Nicky pushed his thighs further apart and began to draw the same track up Joe’s other leg. Joe looked down at his hardening cock - half hidden between his body and Nicky’s - and sighed low in pleasure. “So hard for me,” Nicky mumbled and looked up at Joe. He always said that with such adoration it made Joe simultaneously melt from the sweetness of it and become increasingly, desperately aroused. Nicky looked up at Joe with a wicked smile on his face and then licked a stripe from the bottom of Joe’s cock to the head. He closed his mouth around it and circled with his tongue. Joe immediately leaned back, biting his lips as a needy moan escaped him. With every soft touch of Nicky’s lips, Joe felt in a small way that his mind and body were starting to reconnect. Physicality and consciousness became opposing magnets, slowly, slowly straining to come together again.

“Nicky, your mouth - _fuck,_ ” Joe mumbled. He looked down through half-lidded eyes as Nicky took him fully in, humming in satisfaction around him. He began to move slowly, falling into a steady rhythm which made Joe grasp onto the sheets and squeeze his eyes closed. Joe allowed himself to disappear into the feeling of Nicky’s mouth against him and found himself babbling praise which made Nicky suck and lick more frantically. “I love you,” Joe found himself gasping. “I love you, I love you, I love you.” He looked down at Nicky, at his closed eyes, the wetness around his mouth and the sight of his own cock moving in and out. The scene itself - Nicky, fully naked, on his knees on the hardwood floor; cock hard against his stomach - should have been obscene but Joe found himself almost overwhelmed by the beauty and absolute tenderness of it. He ran his fingers through Nicky’s still half-wet hair and cupped the back of his head, not holding him in place, but allowing Nicky to direct the movements. Nicky changed his rhythm slightly, sucking deeply as if his life depended on it. A sharp jolt of pleasure shuddered through Joe and he cried out. He wouldn’t last long if Nicky kept going like that.

“Nicky,” he said through gritted teeth. “Nicky, stop - going to come.”

Nicky gave him one last long, slow lick and then let Joe’s cock fall out of his mouth. He ghosted around the head with soft kisses which he then moved to the inside of Joe’s thighs.

“I love you,” Nicky breathed against him. Joe reached down and ran a hand through Nicky’s hair again; he looked up at him, eyes slightly glazed, his lips flushed red and cheeks pink.

“Come here,” Joe said. Nicky eased himself up off his knees and stepped over Joe’s thighs, straddling him. Joe pressed a kiss to Nicky’s mouth, kissing him deeply, and ran a finger from the middle of Nicky’s chest down his stomach and into the dark tangle of hair even lower still. Nicky’s eyes fluttered shut and he let out a breathy moan as Joe lightly wrapped his hand around his cock and gave him a few slow, cursory strokes. “Get on the bed,” Joe’s tone darkened slightly, in the way he knew Nicky liked. Nicky shivered as Joe drew his hand off him and he stepped off Joe’s thighs, walking on his knees onto the bed. Moving up towards the top, he knelt there and laid forward, head down, resting on his elbows, ass in the air. Joe’s breath hitched in his throat as he climbed onto the bed behind Nicky, who chuckled softly at the sound.

Joe sighed happily. He stroked his hands over Nicky’s rear, squeezing the muscle and massaging the bottom of his back with his thumbs. Nicky let out a happy growl as Joe reached up to the top of the bed, grabbed a pillow, covered it with his discarded shirt, and placed it under Nicky’s hips to raise his ass up higher. It hid his beautiful cock from view, but gave Nicky something to rub against in the way Joe knew he enjoyed. Nicky shifted himself on the pillow, arching his back downwards and lifting his ass up. He spread his legs wider in an invitation for Joe to start what he was waiting for.

“You’re exquisite,” Joe whispered. He ran a hand from the nape of Nicky’s neck, drawing spirals around each knob of his vertebrae down to his tailbone. Nicky shivered and pushed his ass higher into the air, begging for Joe to touch him. Joe didn’t and instead repeated the same trail with his mouth, brushing his lips across the soft hairs at the bottom of Nicky’s neck and moving down his spine, worshipping each interval. Nicky sighed and shivered underneath Joe’s lips, before holding himself very still, in the way Joe knew he did when he was trying with all his might not to grind down against the pillow. This time Joe moved lower, pressing little kisses down across the curve of Nicky’s rear. He could write poems about Nicky’s ass - he had done so in fact, many years ago - but now he just lightly pressed his teeth against Nicky’s skin. A deep jolt of rapture struck Joe right in the bottom of his stomach as Nicky whimpered and finally allowed himself to roll his hips.

“Joe,” Nicky hissed and turned back to look at him, eyes wide. “Touch me.”

“Hmm - maybe I’m just enjoying the show.” Joe knew he was being a tease - but equally, he knew how much Nicky liked it. Nicky laughed a laugh which turned into an indignant little snort.

Overwhelmed by love for him, Joe spread Nicky’s cheeks, leaned in and ghosted his lips over Nicky’s entrance. “Is this where you want to be touched?” The sight of Nicky, spread open and waiting for him never got old; it was transcendental, beyond time, beyond space, beyond... _everything_.

“Yes,” Nicky said, his voice strained. “Yes, Yusuf. _Yes_.”

Joe didn’t oblige. Instead he lightly touched his tongue to the soft skin behind Nicky’s balls and moved upwards in small little licks. Nicky’s initial gasp turned into a soft huff as Joe worked his way up. When he finally, _finally_ pressed a soft kiss to Nicky’s rim and circled his tongue around, Nicky cried out and nearly fell forwards onto his face. Joe allowed himself to disappear into the feel of Nicky’s thighs shaking against the front of his shoulders and chest, the taste of him, the feeling of intimacy and safety. Nicky circled his hips and forced himself further back against Joe’s mouth. He was loud in bed in a way he wasn’t in any other situation, especially when Joe did this. Nicky whimpered as Joe teased the tip of his tongue inside him. He slumped forward onto his forearms, his head bowed, breath coming in little hitches, rolling his hips frantically against the pillow. In his mind’s eye, Joe imagined Nicky’s cock leaking below him and resisted the urge to reach down to stroke himself. That would come - in time. Out of the two of them, Nicky was always the more patient one but Joe knew, right now, that he needed to wait.

Instead, Joe worked Nicky open slowly, easing more of his tongue inside and marvelling at the sounds he elicited from Nicky in response. Out of his periphery, Joe could just see the outline of Nicky’s profile. He lay with his face turned to one side, cheek squished against the mattress, and his hands stretched out in front of him, fingers flexing into the sheets. _Beautiful_. In pleasure, the tension held in his limbs dispersed, the hard lines of his body softened and became more gallium than steel.

Nicky’s breath hitched as Joe ran a finger down the back of his balls and slipped his hand, palm up, underneath where Nicky’s cock rested against the pillow. It was wet underneath his hand - hard and warm. Nicky mewled and rubbed up against him as Joe worked his tongue around and in and out, melting against each of his touches. His cries grew louder and more fanatic; his thighs shook and Joe knew Nicky was getting close to the edge.

“Joe,” Nicky gasped out, reaching a hand behind and palming blindly at Joe’s flank. “Joe, your fingers please.” He gasped as Joe darted his tongue in and out quicker. “Fingers - now - need -” Joe slipped his tongue out and moved to soft little circular licks. Nicky panted hard. “Yusuf -” He pushed his hand under himself and touched the tips of Joe’s fingers. “Move your hand - I’m going to come from that.”

“Babe,” Joe started, a wicked tone in his voice. “Since when have you only been able to come once?”

Nicky laughed, and tapped at the end of Joe’s fingertips more frantically. He suppressed a groan as he accidentally brushed against his own cock.

“Hmm, Yusuf, we are -” Nicky caught his breath “- running at around a sixty percent chance in favour of multiple orgasms. I don’t want to risk it today.”

“Like we did in Zeebrugge?”

Nicky groaned into the mattress, in mock frustration rather than pleasure now.

“Jesus, Joe - don’t mention _fucking_ Zeebrugge.” Joe laughed as well. In Zeebrugge, they had had plans - very _well laid_ plans - which were ruined by Joe sucking Nicky off a little bit too quickly. Nicky laughed too, open and slightly hysterical, still riding the endorphin high from Joe going down on him. Suddenly, they were both laughing, unabashedly and honestly and intimately, in a way that Joe didn’t think they had laughed for what felt like a very long time.

“Nicolò,” Joe said softly. The mention of Nicky’s name cut through the fog of arousal in the room. “I really _fucking_ love you - you always know that right?”

“Always,” Nicky said, a simple word for how much weight it held. “Always, my love, always.” In a way which was somehow also utterly tender, Nicky pushed his ass out again - silently saying: _your fingers_ now. Joe pressed a kiss to Nicky’s back; drew his hand out and basked in the way Nicky shivered. Joe wiped his hand on the sheets and reached for the washbag. He opened it and drew out the small bottle of lube; squeezed some onto his fingers and rubbed some on Nicky as well. Nicky’s entrance was wet and partially ready from Joe’s tongue, just the way he liked it. He eased a finger inside; it slid in easy, slipping in up to his knuckle. “Get me ready,” Nicky whispered, voice dark again. It made Joe just want to grab his own cock, fist up and down and come all over Nicky’s back right now. Joe resisted and instead began working his finger in and out of Nicky, curling it inwards in a crooking motion in search of his prostate. Nicky keened when he found it. It didn’t take long, Joe knew Nicky’s body better than his own. “More,” Nicky whispered. Before he had finished the word, Joe was already pushing another finger inside, knowing by the way his body felt that he was ready. Nicky turned his face to the side again, eyes shut, drooling a little onto the sheets, babbling incoherently. Joe fucked his fingers in and out while leaning over Nicky’s back and pressing kisses into the back of his neck.

“Two seconds,” Nicky mumbled after a bit. Joe withdrew his fingers almost all the way out as Nicky rolled over onto his back. His cock lay heavy and leaking against his stomach as he splayed his legs. His cheeks were flushed, the corner of his lips wet and Joe felt his breath hitch in his throat at the sight of him. He hooked Nicky’s knees over his hips and pulled him forwards. A smile broke out over Nicky’s face. “Just wanted to see you,” he whispered and reached up his hands to cup Joe’s face. “Beautiful. You make me feel so good.” Nicky tilted his hips up and Joe thrust his fingers in again, slow and exploratory.

“You do say the most romantic things.” He crooked his fingers upwards, alternating moving each one forwards and back in a rhythm he had perfected over the centuries. As expected - but in a way that was just as thrilling each time - the movement turned Nicky into a quivering and gasping mess. His eyes unfocused and then he squeezed them shut as a hot blush spread from his neck to his navel. “Very romantic -” Joe paused, added more lube and teased another finger inside. Nicky inhaled in pleasure. “- for me having three fingers in your ass.”

“Mm, you should -” Nicky whined as Joe found _just_ the right spot “ - see what I say -” he paused again, catching his breath “ - when I am riding your cock.”

“Oh, is _that_ the plan,” Joe said with a slight chuckle

“I don’t hear your complaining,” Nicky said, his eyes still closed. He opened then and looked down at Joe’s fingers when he noticed he had stilled. “Keep going though, I’ll say when I am ready.”

“Aye, aye, captain.”

Nicky laughed at that, loud and open-mouthed. Joe was once again floored by how much he loved him. Nicky reached out and grabbed Joe’s free hand, lacing their fingers together as he worked his hips with the rhythm of Joe’s fingers, taking them fully inside. His eyes fluttered shut again as he chased his pleasure. Sweat beaded on his hairline and at the bottom of his neck. Joe looked down at his own cock, hard and waiting - he thought about bringing Nicky’s hand around and placing it there, but instead Nicky groaned: “Need your cock.”

Joe growled in anticipation, it was as if Nicky knew exactly what he wanted. “ _Joe_...” Always one to oblige, Joe curved his fingers up again and almost stilled them inside of Nicky, working the three of them in soft little pulses.

Nicky looked up and made eye contact with Joe who fumbled one-handed with the lube bottle. Nicky held his hand out and Joe knew wordlessly what he wanted to do. He slipped his fingers out of Nicky who groaned at the loss of sensation. Joe squeezed some lube onto Nicky’s hand. Nicky sat up slowly and wrapped his hand around Joe’s cock. “Beautiful,” he hummed. “You are gorgeous, my love.” Joe just moaned, head thrown back, words no longer forming in his mind, as Nicky moved his hand up and down. “Hush, hush, my love,” Nicky whispered adoringly into Joe’s collarbone as he shifted forward into Joe’s lap. He hovered over him and lined himself up with his cock. After a few tries to find the right angle, slowly - ever so slowly - Nicky lowered himself down. Joe gasped, all the breath punched out of his lungs at the sensation. “ _Nicky_ ,” he keened. “God, _fuck -_ Nicky, you feel so good.” Nicky exhaled, calm and controlled until a moan escaped him as Joe bottomed out.

“Hey,” Nicky said, breathlessly, tracing a finger across Joe’s cheek. “How are you doing?” He rolled his hips ever so slightly; Joe only managed a little squeak and nodded in affirmation. He knew it was about more than if he was comfortable physically. Nicky looked at him with wide eyes, brows furrowed, concerned.

“I’m better,” Joe managed to gasp out. “Come here.” He tilted Nicky’s chin down and kissed him, deeply and passionately, trying to convey how he felt about him, trying to show that _here_ \- in this exact moment - he was okay. Satisfied, Nicky lifted himself up and down a little, hummed contentedly and ground his hips. Joe could just see the base of his cock moving in and out of him. A jolt of pleasure ran through him and for a split second Joe thought he was going to come from the sight of that alone. He ran his hands up and down Nicky’s back and pulled him close to him. Joe adored how Nicky shivered when the head of his cock brushed across Joe’s stomach. He reached out his hand for it - but Nicky gently tapped it away.

“Wait a bit,” he said. “I want to make this last.” Nicky leaned in, kissed Joe and ran his hands up and down his back. He ground down and rose up, lifted and lowered his hips - head thrown back, chasing his pleasure. His cock leaked with every movement, brushing up against Joe’s stomach. All Joe could do was stare at Nicky, at the flex of his thighs; the roll of his stomach muscles as he moved and sighed when he found just the right spot. Joe loved it when they fucked like this; Nicky’s head tilted slightly downwards so they could rest their foreheads together, feeling so close it was almost as if they were becoming one person. Nicky squeezed his thighs against Joe’s and continued his leisurely pace. He brought the hand around Joe’s back up and cupped the nape of his neck.

“Nicky,” Joe gasped, as Nicky rubbed the soft skin tenderly. “ _Fuck_ Nicky... You feel - amazing.”

This close, Joe could just about see that Nicky smiled - in that half way he did so often - then shut his eyes as he increased his pace. There was a pleasure in this unlike anything else; a synchronicity, their bodies fluid and moving in tandem; pushing and pulling against each other like the moon controlling the tides. Rolling down and building up and moving in and out again under the influence of some far-away force. The pleasure building in Joe’s stomach grew more intense and he tightened his grip on Nicky’s hips, helping guide his movements. He cracked his eyes open to see Nicky - head thrown back, eyes closed. Sweat beaded on his brow and as he ground down again a single drop traced down his flushed cheek. Joe looked down to Nicky’s cock and was once against struck by how gorgeous it was. It might have been melodramatic - he was prone to that, especially in this state - but Joe thought he would _literally_ die if he didn’t touch him right now.

“Can I?” he managed to gasp out, ghosting his hand just over it. “Nicky, please.”

“Yeah,” Nicky replied. “Touch me.”

Joe rubbed his thumb in a small circle around the head and used the wetness there to reduce the friction as he stroked up and down. As soon as he touched him, Nicky threw his head back and let out what could only be described as a howl and ground down furiously on Joe’s cock. Almost as if he was surprised at how loud he had been, Nicky opened his eyes wide, realising that the balcony door was still half open only covered by the curtain. In response, he bit down on the back of his hand, muffling his cries so Joe could only hear little half-whimpers. They fell into a moderate rhythm, Joe’s strokes matching the movement of Nicky’s hips. Soon they both sped up, clinging onto each other as if lost in a snowstorm, as if they were both each other’s only way home.

“I love you,” Joe gasped out. As Nicky moved quicker again, Joe lost his train of thought. He realised he didn’t know what he was saying and mumbled nonsense into Nicky’s collarbone. Joe stroked him faster and felt Nicky clench around him.

“I’m close,” Nicky said, in a whisper-quiet voice. “Keep going.”

“Me too,” Joe managed to choke out. Nicky rolled his hips in a very particular way and Joe felt the pleasure build and build until it almost became too much. He heard himself cry out distantly, more desperate now. The world shrunk down to the sounds of their breathing and the sensations in his body. Joe squeezed his hands hard around Nicky’s hips - he didn’t know it was possible to feel so good. It was nice to be reminded. Like a tight cord breaking, Joe felt himself fray and snap, spilling inside Nicky. Rolling waves of pleasure washed over him as if they would never stop. Nicky groaned, and Joe moved his hand quicker, still out of it from his own orgasm. He forced his eyes open to see Nicky. who leaned forwards, forehead against Joe’s; his mouth open but no sound coming out as he came in Joe’s hand and across his chest.

Deep down, Joe knew that this didn’t _fix_ anything, but just in this small moment it was as if all his worries - all the pain and hurt of the last few weeks - melted away like wax in front of a flame

“Yusuf,” Nicky gasped and fell forwards against Joe’s shoulder. “ _Shit..._ ”

Joe held him and focused on the sensations: the cooling stickiness against their bodies; the quick rise and fall of Nicky’s shoulders; the fast but regular beat of his heart; the warmth of them pressed together. Everything which screamed _life._ They were here, they were alive, they were together. It was everything, _more_ than everything. For a terrifying moment, Joe was sure he was going to burst into tears. Nicky seemed to know how he was feeling and held him close, hushing him gently, whispering sweet words about how good he was and how much he loved him. Joe responded by pulling him down for a kiss. They kissed slowly, sensually, the way that they had done for centuries. Nicky moved his hips lazily, enjoying the lingering feeling of fullness he liked after orgasm, but careful to not overstimulate Joe. His own cock had softened now and it lay back against his thigh, trapped between their bodies.

Eventually, Nicky loosened his hands from around Joe’s back, and Joe immediately felt himself flop backwards onto the bed, boneless. He wasn’t sure how he had been holding himself up in a sitting position the whole time. He lay against the cool sheets and allowed his breathing to regulate. A groan forced its way out of him as Nicky slowly eased himself off his cock, dripping wetness onto his thighs. Nicky retrieved the already damp t-shirt and gave himself a quick clean. He pressed a kiss to Joe’s cheek and then swung his legs off the bed and stood up.

“Where are you going?” Joe asked, a bit surprised by the note of anxiety in his voice.

“Just the bathroom, my love,” Nicky replied. “To get us something better to clean up with.” Nicky usually liked to clean up straight away if they were able. He hated the feeling of sweat and come and lube drying on his skin. He returned quickly with a warm washcloth and took each of Joe’s hands in his own to wash them. Tenderly, he wiped around Joe’s cock, making sure there was nothing trapped in the dark hair there and moved down to get the inside of his thighs. The warmth from the water was lovely and Joe felt his eyes start to close. When he was done, Nicky lay down next to him, head on Joe’s chest, and cuddled in close.

“You never let me forget how good you are at that,” Joe said after a while, once he felt he could construct rational thoughts again.

Nicky laughed and Joe felt it vibrate against him. “Team effort,” he responded and tucked his nose into the side of Joe’s neck. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Joe said and ran a hand up and down Nicky’s back.

They had said that a lot over the past few weeks, fueled by fear and anxiety, wanting the other to always know should anything happen to them.

“How are you feeling?” Nicky asked, pressing his lips to where Joe’s jawbone met his neck and kissing gently.

“Better,” Joe replied. He did feel a little bit more like himself, but the uneasy feeling of detachment was still clouding the edges of his mind. “Better than before, a bit more present.”

“My darling,” Nicky whispered into his neck. “I wish I could take your pain away.”

“I wouldn’t want you to have it,” Joe said, with utter sincerity. “That would hurt me more.” He ran his hand through Nicky’s hair, and rested his chin on the side of his head. “How are you?”

“I am okay,” Nicky replied. “I mean - I am sad, I am angry, I am heartbroken. I wish none of this had ever happened.” Joe thought back to Nicky waking in the night with a cry; grabbing a gun immediately, terrified by his own thoughts. Nicky swilling his bloody mouth out with water and retching into the toilet in the Kent flophouse. Nicky’s whole body shaking with unreleased emotion and rage as they left Booker on the banks of the Thames. Nicky broken, beaten, dissected, _abused_ as Joe watched, screaming silently.

He pressed a kiss to the top of Nicky’s head and felt his hair tickle his lips.“It will get better,” Nicky said, with that conviction that Joe always envied in him. “Things will be hard for a while, but they will get better.”

Out of the two of them, they had very different ways of viewing the world.

Joe tended to view it from a more pessimistic angle - not in the everyday, but in the grand scheme of things. For Joe, art and beauty and love maintained his positivity, his view that the world - that people - were ultimately always worth fighting for. For every war, for every death, there was a birth. In every sadness there was the potential and capacity for joy. Nicky joked that even in the middle of a battlefield, Joe could always find a love story. Joe would tell him that, usually, it was theirs. It would make Nicky lean in, chuckle slightly and kiss him softly. When Joe couldn’t see beauty anymore, they both knew it was time to take a break and reconnect with the things that grounded them again.

Nicky saw things on a bigger scale. Deep down, he always felt that the world was moving towards some better and greater destiny where there would be less pain and heartbreak. Joe tried to take on this view, usually around the start of a new decade or century, but he found it harder to truly believe in it. It wasn’t that Nicky didn’t get disillusioned by the horrible things that they saw, but that he saw them as bad events - not a progression of the way the world was going. It did mean that - when they went through rough times - Nicky was prone to feelings of melancholy when he felt that he couldn’t do enough to help; couldn’t do enough to right the world back to the way it was meant to be.

“They will get better,” Joe repeated, almost to reassure himself. “They have to. They will for all of us.” Nicky hummed in affirmation and leaned in. They kissed slowly, languidly, trying to prove to each other that everything really was going to be alright.

“I wonder how they are getting on?” Nicky asked. “It’s been a lot for Nile over the last few weeks and a lot for Andy to deal with as well. I am worried about them both.”

“We should call them,” Joe replied, thinking back to what Nicky had said earlier. “See how they’re getting on, see if they need anything.”

“Sounds good,” Nicky replied and then yawned. “Doze first?” he asked.

“You always know my answer to that,” Joe laughed and Nicky cuddled in even closer. He shut his eyes and allowed the feeling of Nicky curled up next to him - the warmth of his body, the gentle cadence of his breathing - to slowly ease him into a light slumber. For once, he didn’t dream.

When he woke, slowly and blearily, he couldn’t feel Nicky against him anymore. A surge of anxiety spiked through him which quieted when a hand brushed across his curls gently.

“I’m here,” Nicky whispered. “Don’t worry. I’m here.” Joe felt his heartbeat slow again. Nicky sat next to him on the bed, dressed again now in a soft t-shirt and sweatpants. The room was darker, lit by evening sun, weaker now than it had been earlier in the day.

“How long have I been asleep?” Joe asked, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. It felt like it had simultaneously been a long time and no time at all.

“Just about an hour and a half. I slept a bit, then woke up. I was worried my tossing was going to wake you, so I just got up.” Joe sat up, stretched and wrapped his arm around the back of his husband. The blue light of Nicky’s phone screen illuminated his face.

“What you doing?” Joe asked, scooching closer to him.

“Just messaging Andy,” Nicky replied. “She’s going to call in five minutes.” He scanned up and down Joe’s body, still fully naked where he lay on the top of the rumpled sheets.

“I’ll make myself decent,” Joe said.

Nicky laughed softly and trailed a hand down from Joe’s chest to his navel, playing with the trail of dark hair. “I don’t know, you look pretty decent,” he said. Joe looked at him with serious eyes.

“I don’t want to scare Nile away just yet.”

“Very true.” Nicky stretched his legs out in front of him and went to swing them off the bed. “I’ll go onto the balcony, I want to smoke.” He stood up, stretched again and pressed a small kiss to Joe’s head before walking out the balcony doors again, phone in hand. Joe lay back on the bed for a little while and then got dressed into a pair of shorts and a cap-sleeved t-shirt. Once he was ready, he stepped out onto the balcony.

“Hey sleepyhead,” Andy called as Joe crossed over to where Nicky was sitting. Her voice sounded tinny and far away through the phone speaker.

“Hi, Joe,” Nile's voice came through a second later. Joe perched himself sideways across Nicky’s lap so that they could both see the screen.

“How’s things?” Joe asked. Andy on the screen looked drawn and pale. Nile’s hair was pulled back in braids and she wore a scarf tied around her head to keep them up in a bun. They both sat in front of a nondescript magnolia wall, on which hung a small painting of a ship in a natural harbour with a castle on the hill behind. Andy pulled up her jumper and showed Joe the wound above her hip. It was still covered with a dressing, however there was no bloody strikethrough now, like there had been in London.

“Healing up,” Andy said. “God, I forgot how much things _hurt._ ” She rolled her jumper down and settled back on the bed. With a small groan, she leaned against the headboard.

“She was being _very_ dramatic about being hungover yesterday,” Nile laughed, and tapped Andy on the arm. Andy scoffed and shook her head. Nicky and Joe laughed too.

“Never,” Andy insisted. “I’m still recovering from being shot, you know. That was the reason why I was so ill.” Nile rolled her eyes with affection.

It was nice to see the two of them.

“How are you both?” Andy asked.

“We’re alright,” they said in unison. “It is not easy,” Nicky chipped in. “Good and bad moments.”

“Tell me about it,” Andy sighed. She looked distant for a second and then said again what she’d told Joe earlier: “I miss him. I hate that I miss him but I do.”

“It’s okay to feel that way,” Nicky said, his voice soft. Joe knew how close Andy and Booker had been. Andy had very much seen it as ‘them against the world’. The two of them were inseparable, bickered like siblings, but also - like they all did - truly loved and cared for each other. Joe knew how hard this was for Andy. It was hard for all of them but _especially_ for her.

“And you Nile?” Joe asked. Nile opened her eyes a little wider and stopped fiddling with one of her earrings.

“Oh, I’m fine,” she said, a little too quickly, her voice drawn. “I mean - I’m not. All of this is so new. And my family -” She cut herself off and shook her head as if she worried she was going to get choked up. The image pixelated a little as Andy reached across and placed an arm around Nile’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Nile, I really am.” Joe said. His family was just a distant memory now, but he remembered the jolt of fear he had felt back in Jerusalem when he’d realised that something was very, very wrong. That fear - of never seeing his loved ones again - had stuck with him for a very long time.

“I just worry about them,” Nile said. “My mom, she’s already been through so much. My brother as well.”

“It is difficult, Nile,” Nicky said. “Take it one day at a time, these last weeks have been a lot for you.”

“I’m trying,” Nile said, sounding younger but also older than she was. “I just miss them.”

Andy pulled her into a hug. “We’ll be alright,” she said, and Joe knew by her tone she was trying to force reassurance into her voice.

“We will,” Nile added, her voice shaking a little.

“Yes,” Nicky said, with that gentle cadence he always took when he was comforting people. “It will be hard but it will get better. We are all here for you, Nile.”

Andy and Nile smiled on the screen, their tired and drawn expressions softened slightly and - just for a minute - Joe felt like everything really was going to be okay.

They talked more, discussing the film Andy and Nile had been watching; the fact that there were monks on the island ( _actual monks_ , Nile said); and the walks they had taken. Nicky showed Nile the book he had bought her and she broke into a smile. They all laughed, they talked, but there was still an air of melancholy in the air; gaps in conversation which went unfilled, comments unspoken.

“We should probably go boys,” Andy said after a while, stretching her sore muscles. “Keep in touch.”

They all said their goodbyes and waved. Andy hung up the call and both Joe and Nicky sat in silence for a little while. Nicky broke it by saying: “Look at the sunset, Yusuf.”

Joe turned from where he sat on Nicky’s lap and looked. Across in the west, the sun slowly dipped down. Inky oranges and reds and yellows bled out across the sky, rich like syrup. A building black cloud full of rain, nearly ready to burst, undercut the colours. The ruddy tones framed Nicky’s face and brought out the green in his eyes; made the fine hair on his arms glow like gold thread. They sat there together, as they had always done, and watched the last of the light dip beneath the buildings and into the sea. It was going to be a long and hard road, but things would get better. All the hardship, all the pain, all the blood and stress and death, they would - they _could_ \- face; together. Nicky smiled and squeezed Joe’s hand.

Perhaps tomorrow, Joe would go out to meet the sunrise; take out his pack of watercolour pencils, and in his sketchbook, immortalise the colours of the new dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> When Nicky mentions Mexico City he is talking about the _Halconazo_ also known as the Corpus Christi Massacre of 1971 where a student protest was attacked by a government-sponsored paramilitary organisation called the Halcones. Official death tolls have never been released, however, the average stands at around 100-120. Many of the injured were taken to a nearby hospital, but the attack continued there. You can read more about it in [this article](https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwpmmw/the-1971-student-massacre-that-mexico-would-rather-forget) and also listen to [a BBC World Service programme which features eye-witness accounts from the massacre](https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwpmmw/the-1971-student-massacre-that-mexico-would-rather-forget). 
> 
> Title comes from a line in Seamus Heaney's masterful translation of _Beowulf_ , the (ex-)medievalist in me had to get some Old English in my fics at some point :P
> 
> As always thank you so much for reading all comments and critiques are welcome - I love to hear from you all! <3
> 
> **EDIT 9/2/21** : this is note to say that since posting I have been contacted by the author of [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26327713?view_full_work=true) expressing concerns about similarities between this work and theirs. Any similarities between the two works were unintentional on my part. However, I am empathetic to this author's concerns. I am glad we were able to sort something out in the end, and I hope both fics can be enjoyed individually and independently as two labours of love.


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